With the rise in popularity of gaming, more and more people have gotten into PC gaming. The unfortunate drawback to the hobby is the steep price of entry and the daunting task of buying and building a high-end gaming rig. Luckily, there are a ton of options on the market nowadays. The only question now is should you get a Gaming Laptop or a Handheld PC?
Handheld or Laptop?

The main two alternatives to PC gaming on the market are handhelds and gaming laptops. While both of these options have different pros and cons, which one is better? While we know that’s subjective, there are inherent advantages in getting one over the other. Let’s get into that.
Portability
The first main reason most people choose Handheld PCs or Gaming Laptops over literally anything else is portability. Not everyone wants to stay at home all day gaming (which doesn’t sound too bad) or want to play when travelling.
If you had asked this question years ago, Handhelds would have won out hands down. Today, however, it’s a different story. Gaming laptops have become so much better in terms of transport capability. Gone are the days of 13 pound gaming monsters since companies have found ways to make gaming laptops thinner and lighter without compromising on performance.

When travelling with either one, bag space is the biggest indicator of how portable something is. Sure, a gaming laptop is thinner than a handheld, but we should look at peripherals you need to bring along to make it work as well. For a laptop, you need to bring the charger, your controller or mouse, and maybe headphones or an external keyboard. As someone who games on the go primarily using a gaming laptop, it can get pretty cumbersome. 40% of my bag is just taken up by my laptop peripherals and it can get pretty heavy.
On the other hand, a handheld has the advantage of being innately designed to be an all in one device. You only really need to bring the charger and maybe headphones as well. All that fits into a small carrying case with a much more compact footprint. Travelling with a Nintendo Switch or an ROG Ally X is so much easier and much more forgiving on the shoulders.
So for this round, I have to give it to the handheld. It’s built with portability in mind and it’s just overall easier to transport and comfier to game with on the go.
Battery Life
Whether you’re gaming on the go or comfortably gaming at home, having a good battery life is essential. Well not really, but it helps a lot! It’s annoying having to stop gaming to plug in your device so it’s understandable to want a device with good battery life. Today’s gaming laptops are meant to played plugged in. That’s how they get better performance. Their battery is there so they can run on battery power for tasks other than gaming. If you game on battery with a gaming laptop, you’ll only get about 30 minutes.

Most handhelds on the other hand have varying battery life performance. The Asus ROG Ally X has one of the best battery life on the market alongside the Steam Deck and Legion Go but all of them last around 3 hours on moderate to heavy gaming. Once again, handhelds have the slight advantage over gaming laptops since they were designed to be played away from the socket. You do have the option to play them plugged in for more power but it’s not a must.
I do want to clarify this though. Yes, there are handhelds with abysmal battery life and there are gaming laptops that do have a bigger battery. In those cases, those specific devices win out over each other. However, in the more general sense and looking at the top competitors, handhelds basically take the edge.
Price to Performance
I know some of you are tired of hearing about this but not everyone can just slap 100,000 Pesos on the table and call it a day. Gaming is already expensive as it is so it helps to think about how much you spend when getting into it.

Now, this is where things get a little more complicated. Gaming laptops will almost always have a better overall performance compared to handhelds. They’re more powerful and have a ton of options. They, however, cost more to buy. Handhelds on the other hand all mostly run the same APU and only really differ in terms of system optimization and storage. They’re mostly on 16gb of RAM and run games at 60 FPS. While it is decent and allows you to enjoy games smoothly, it can’t reach the FPS of a gaming laptop.
That said, it would be totally unfair to compare a high-end gaming laptop like the ROG Zephyrus G16 with something like an ROG Ally X. At that price point, you might as well get a gaming PC. When comparing a 50,000 peso handheld like the ROG Ally X to an equally priced gaming laptop like the Lenovo Legion LOQ, we see that laptops need a bit of more upgrades to match the performance. Higher end gaming laptops tend to cost a lot more compared to handhelds.

Handhelds are usually a lot more optimized towards gaming and can comfortably run most triple A titles. At the price you get them for, they perform incredibly well. I do have a slight bias towards the Steam Deck OLED mainly because of how smooth Steam OS is compared to running windows on the other handhelds is. Laptops are great in terms of performance but rarely perform as well as handhelds stock at the same price.
I have to give this one to handhelds once more given that the performance to price of handhelds is undeniably a lot better. They come out of the box optimized for gaming and don’t cost nearly as much as the high end gaming laptops.
Overall Winner

Overall, handhelds come out on top in our opinion. There’s a lot more upside and benefit to handhelds, especially if you’re on a budget. If you have cash to burn and don’t mind spending a little bit more, then get a nice gaming laptop. However, it’s hard to deny the ease of use and the comfortability of gaming on a handheld. They’re light, portable, and decently priced. At the end of the day, handhelds seem to be the clear winner.
Wanna know the best gaming platform according to us? check out this article.