14 DAY TRIAL // Despite continuous weak profit coming from the sales of traditional notebooks, laptop vendors seem to believe that all people want or need in their life is a gaming notebook.
As a report from DigiTimes notes, as soon as NVIDIA announced its latest GeForce GTX 970M and 980M GPUs for gaming laptops, most device makers hurried to roll out models taking advantage of the new architecture.
Gaming notebooks are said to be on the rise
These vendors are expected to trigger a new wave of competition in Q4 2014 as demand for such machines is said to be on the rise.
On top of that, more and more governments around the world grant their support for professional gaming competitions, say sources inside the retail channel.
However, the trouble with gaming notebooks is that they are highly expensive, so the average customer is kept at bay from such products from the get-go, leaving these laptops to form their own highly-specialized and elitist niche.
It hasn't been even a week since NVIDIA launched the latest GPUs, but most key gaming solution providers have already jumped onboard with the new standard.
Roundup of gaming vendors with NVIDIA GTX 980M / 970M laptops
If you’re a little late in making it to the party, we’ll take a moment to refresh your memory. Eurocom said it was updating its lines of fully upgradable laptops, including X3, X5, X7, X8 with either GTX 970M and 980M GPU in single or SLI.
MAINGEAR rolled out the NOMAD 17, which is an all-new model with a 17.3-inch display and working in concert with either GTX 970M or 980M.
MSI has revamped up to five existing gaming machines, including the GS70 Stealth Pro, GS60 Ghost Pro, GT72 Dominator Pro, GT70 Dominator and GT60 Dominator with the new GPU standard.
Origin’s EON17-SLX also brings a powerful configuration to the table, being offered with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 980M in SLI.
Other companies like CyberPOWER (with the Fangbook Edge), ASUS (with the ROG G751), Gigabyte (with P35X / P34W) and Auros (with the X7 Pro) have also applied the same treatment. And more models are expected to make a debut on the market, be it all-new products or refreshes of existing machinery.
As we have mentioned above, all these laptops are quite expensive revolving around the $1,000 – $2,000 / $786 – $1,572 margin.
The Asian sources mention that gaming notebook manufacturers are expected to fiercely compete in the gaming motherboard market as well, by virtue of products using Intel’s Z97 and X99 chipsets.
On top of that, vendors like ASUS, Gigabyte or MSI appear to be heavily invested in organizing, hosting and supporting gaming competition, as a crucial means to support the highly premium gaming notebook market.