Up until this year my work gave me a personal IT budget of $5k/year. There were some restrictions, like it all had to be on a single order, had to be from their only approved source (couldn't just Amazon/Newegg my own DIY parts). So I alternated every other year buying the most expensive laptop I could find 1 year and the most expensive desktop the next year - gave the hand-me-down PCs to family.

I tried doing the $4k+ 17" "gaming laptops" for years, but never really liked the experience. Even with a 17" screen and a 2nd portable monitor I never did like multiboxing while traveling. It just couldn't compare to the large triple monitor setup I'm used to at home. I finally gave up on big laptops a few years ago and just went with a MS Surface Book. I really liked traveling with it, and it was good enough to make single player WoW look good enough while traveling. I did find that 13.5" was a bit too small for me, so 2 years ago I got their 15" model and it seems to work great - best mix of portability while still making single player WoW workable. (And I was on the road for 10+ months in 2018.) I liked my 15" Surface Book 2 so much, when I got home, I bought the dock for it, and had it all set up for my monitor/keyboard, but it just didn't have near the power as my older desktop (i7-7700k, 1080ti). I couldn't multibox on the surface book at all, and once I got all my usual applications and windows open like I generally do on a desktop it was struggling even when it was idling. I don't know how people game on laptops, much less multibox on them.

So last year I got a nice i9-9900k, 2080ti desktop system and its worked great - although multiboxing classic, even at 4k, isn't really that much of a stress test.

This year should be my year to upgrade laptops, but with no travel at all for the forseeable future, I'm thinking a new Ryzen 4900 and a high RAM version of the 3080 or 3090 should be great. Anxious to see what AMD rolls out in October.