G-Sync automatically means no switchable graphics, so yes it does also mean worse battery life. If this will be a portable machine where longevity away from a plug matters, then you will want to make the sacrifice of not having it.
I don't have a ton of recommendations in this category. The Gigabyte Aero 15 is there as well.
It seems my criteria is sort of becoming more clear. I'm ok with branching out to less thin/light laptops too, but I do tend to gravitate towards the designs of the thinner ones. I imagine the less thin ones would be a little cheaper though on the plus side.
This
Acer Predator Triton 500 is a bit more than I'd like to spend, but using it as an example of what seems to be a laptop where you can switch between the graphics even though it is g-sync. In the customer reviews at the bottom:
"In the bios I have an option for switchable graphics - "MSHybrid" and "dGPU"."
It's possible they're wrong above in their comments, but I am ok with a shorter batter life anyway. I think I'll like the smoother g-sync gameplay, even if it means ~3 hours battery life when not gaming. It'll most be used at home, so power won't be a huge issue.
So basically I think I'm looking for:
-15-16" laptops, with a thinner bezel
-144hz, gsync
- newer RTX cards (2060-2080)
- nice display (Dolby HDR maybe a nice bonus)
Some of the older laptops that met most but not all of those criteria tend to have much thicker bezels which does imo look a bit worse to me.
The Lenovo Legion Y740 while good in the other aspects above, is a bit weaker in its display from the notebookcheck review. Slower response times (compared to the Acer Triton 500) and bad bleeding / uneven brightness.
I think I probably just need to be patient for a while and wait, because there's not a whole lot of 15-16" laptops with the above criteria under or around 2k (basically just the Lenovo Y740 I think - the rest are closer to 2.5k or even 3k). Unless there's any candidates I'm missing from the non-light & thin categories.
Also, one final question, would a non- g-sync laptop be able to use any sort of g-sync/freesync feature while it is connected to an external HDTV/Monitor? I'm pretty sure I want the g-sync on the laptop itself, but if it's possible for a laptop without g-sync built in to still use it on an external display, that wouldn't be a terrible compromise.
Edit: Thinking more about it, the display being the biggest knock against the Y740 from that one review maybe isn't that bad to take it off the list. So that's probably the forerunner for me now actually. I'll keep my eyes open for a while and see if I still feel the same way down the road a bit - if so I'll likely get that it.