Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Above: Whiskey's laptop running SL  — photo courtesy Whiskey Monday

If you're looking for a new PC gamer laptop that runs Second Life well, acclaimed metaverse artist Whiskey Monday recommends the ASUS – ROG Zephyrus 16":

"This is my new laptop and it's light and ridiculously powerful in Second Life," she writes in Comments. "I can run Second Life and Photoshop at the same time and while the fans are loud, it runs like a champ."

It's currently selling for under $2000 on both Amazon and Best Buy so definitely worth a look. As for the loud fans, that's a frequently reported side effect of the Firestorm viewer grunting and groaning to process all those high end graphics. (For what it's worth, my Dell G5 15 gamer laptop runs the official SL browser pretty well without heavy fan action, but then again, I generally don't run it on maximum graphic settings.)

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Above: High-res image created on Whiskey's Zephyrus laptop (via her Flickr)

"Light" by the way, might be a relative term, because (as reader Mondy notes), the Zephyrus is just over 4 pounds. That plus the AC adapter may get you in 5-7 pound range. Which might not seem heavy, but if you're planning on taking it many places, I'd definitely recommend a good backpack that distributes that weight well.

Speaking of weight, longtime reader "dkronfeld" recommends (somewhat surprisingly) the MacBook Air, which weighs in at under 3 pounds. However, that comes with a graphics hit and settings to adjust:

The MacBook Air runs SL surprisingly well, if you disable Hardware Open GL Vertex Buffer Objects (used to be a graphics setting, is now a debug setting) and set water reflections to "None:Opaque". It's actually a shockingly good SL laptop, if "not too heavy" is a requirement.

Buyer beware and all that! Ideally, I'd recommend going into a show room and convincing the sales people to let you try out Second Life on a display model, before buying.

All of this hardware research, of course, would not be necessary if Linden Lab just returned to offering a cloud streaming option, like they did with OnLive in 2014. I mean, if an "all you can stream" plan cost as much as $50 a month, you could run SL on an old laptop (even a browser-only Chrome book!) for three years, and it'd still be more cost effective than buying an ASUS – ROG Zephyrus 16". But I digress.

Speaking of which, what wacky marketing people at ASUS decided to call this thing a "ROG Zephyrus"?