Power and performance are often incredibly fleeting in the world of PC gaming. Unlike console generations that cycle every 7 years, PCs require frequent and varied upgrades to play the latest and greatest. What's more, PCs are generally unmovable. A console can pretty readily move around the house or even outside it, but your gaming PC is more or less connected to your desk.

For the sake of simplicity and flexibility, many turn to gaming laptops as a solution. There are more of them available on the market than ever before, and their performance can often rival even the most capable gaming desktop. On top of that, their portability gives them an incredible advantage over desktops. Whether taking them on the road or just into another room for a bit of variety — a welcome reprieve in this era of mandatory work from home so many of us are experiencing — a gaming laptop can allow us to un-tether without leaving our games behind.

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The downsides of relying on a gaming laptop are just as apparent as the benefits: laptops are not modular in the way PCs are. Upgrades can be difficult or altogether impossible. Even something as simple as upgrading storage may not be feasible for many gaming laptops, meaning you may end up getting stuck with the storage options you chose at the time of purchase no matter how much space new games take up.

The solution: Seagate's 4TB Firecuda Gaming Dock. Part external drive and part docking station, the Firecuda Gaming Dock is an essential tool to get the absolute most out of your gaming laptop. It's really an upgrade path for your laptop, as it is itself upgradeable, and it will greatly expand your laptop gaming horizons. It doesn't hurt that the form factor and built-in RGB look incredible, either.

The Desktop Experience With Laptop Flexibility

What I love so much about the Gaming Dock is that it gives me everything I need to transform my laptop into a desktop instantly and easily. It's got all of the ports necessary for a full desktop setup. It connects to any laptop with a with Thunderbolt 3 and has a display port for your monitor, an RJ45 ethernet port for internet, 3.5mm audio in and out, and 5 USB 3.1 ports (3 in the back and 2 in the front) for your mouse, keyboard, headphones, etc. Just about everything you could need is available on the Gaming Dock's I/O so that once it's all plugged in, you only need to connect the Thunderbolt 3 to your laptop and you're ready to go.

Once you're connected, you'll have access to Seagate's Toolkit app that can automatically back up your files to the 4TB drive. You can also create a custom plan to determine when and what Toolkit backs up from your system. Further, you can create a Mirror Plan on the drive that allows you to designate any folder on your laptop and create a mirror on the gaming dock that instantly copies and updates whenever things are added or changed in the folder. These are productivity tools that are incredibly easy to manage and customize. Generally speaking, all of the backing up is done automatically. Even if you're cloud-based already, it's still great for peace of mind.

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More importantly, that 4TB space can be used for game storage. Considering most gaming laptops come with around 500GB of storage, this is an exceptional upgrade — especially if you dedicate the storage to games. You may be concerned about running games off of an external drive, but the 72,000RPM HDD connected to the Thunderbolt 3 proved to be even faster than the internal HDD on my HP Omen. Games like Modern Warfare and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 boot faster and have shorter loading screens on the dock than they did when they were installed on my internal drive. If you really want an impressive upgrade, the Gaming Dock has an M.2 NVMe slot where you can add an SSD, the fastest type of storage available today.

The "Daily Driver" Experience

I went all-in on the Gaming Dock for 2 weeks, forsaking my beefy gaming PC, to see what productivity and gaming feel like with it. I discovered so many benefits of the dock that I hadn't considered, and just a bit of friction.

While plugging in and setting up is straight-forward, you'll need to account for cable management in a way you probably haven't considered before. The docks isn't meant to sit on the floor like a desktop and the laptop doesn't "cradle" on it like traditional productivity docks, so you may have to get a little creative about where you put it and how you hook it up. I decided to get a riser for my monitor with two shelf slots. The dock stays on the bottom shelf while my laptop slides in and out of the top shelf. This works fairly well, though I occasionally lose the Thunderbolt cable behind the shelf in between uses and have to fish it back out. You may be better off just finding a place to put the dock on your desk, but either way, it will have 5-8 cables running out in different directions.

The next minor friction that came up was with regards to my monitor. My monitor had to disconnect from my PC because it only has 1 display port, meaning to switch between the dock and PC I need to unplug the video cable from the dock and plug it into my PC. If your monitor has multiple display port inputs this may not be an issue, but it really drove home the notion that this setup works best as a total PC replacement, rather than a secondary option.

The same thing goes for Laptop power. You're definitely going to want 2 power cables for your laptop, one that stays running under/behind your desk and one you can take with you unless you only plan to use your laptop elsewhere until the battery dies.

If you want to close the laptop while it's docked you'll need to change the Windows setting that automatically puts it in sleep mode when you close it. I found that I was turning this setting back on anytime I used the laptop undocked, but you can just as easily manually put the laptop to sleep from the start menu when you're done using it.

Finally, I've had some pretty frustrating issues with Steam due to docking and undocking the external drive. Steam seems to get very confused about whether you have a game installed when its on an external drive, and sometimes I found myself reinstalling games I definitely had installed to just fix Steam errors.

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Outside of those concerns, my experience with the Gaming Dock has been nothing short of exceptional. I install new games with reckless abandon on the dock and delight in the fact that anything I could ever want to play is right there waiting, ready to be played. I find I have 2 different libraries now: small, casual games I can play in short sessions on my laptop using just the trackpad or a controller, and big games that take up a lot of space and require the highest performance.

I never would have played Modern Warefare on my laptop before because the small screen has a poor refresh rate and the non-mechanical keyboard is too slow, but with the Gaming Dock I can have the full PC experience and I don't even have to worry about how much space it's taking up on my hard drive. The value that the Gaming Dock has added to my laptop is absurd and I could very easily see myself replacing my PC set up with this option. It allows me to leave the office and work in another room during the day, then dock and play games at night. When I eventually replace my laptop with a newer one, I continue to use the Gaming Dock as an extension of any device I choose. The expandable NVMe slot offers even more storage at better speeds. So much to say, the FireCuda Gaming Dock is a totally effective setup that gives laptop users an authentic gaming desktop setup. If you want a flexible option for PC gaming, the Seagate Firecuda Gaming Dock can open a lot of doors.

A Firecuda Gaming Dock was provided to TheGamer for this review. You can learn more about the Gaming Dock on Seagate's website.

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