If you’re looking to buy a hardcore gaming laptop, the first thing you need to realize is that it will never be able to perform as well as a suped up desktop. A motorcycle is stylish and cool, but you can’t lift more than yourself and another person, and any long term riding will strain your back. Same goes for running games on a laptop.
An important factor in choosing a hardcore gaming laptop is the graphics card(s) within. Chunkier notebooks can accommodate desktop graphics cards, while lighter ones tend to sacrifice for mobile versions. Either way, you’re going to want cards that have sufficient stream processing power to handle the type of games you’ll need your laptop to play. For FPS games, you’ll want nothing less than an ATI HD 4850. For any other game, an ATI HD 4550 or an NVIDIA 9600 GSO will do wonders.
The second most important factor is ventilation. It doesn’t matter how much of a beast you’ve got thrashing and kicking under the hood, if it can’t breath, it won’t last. Most gaming laptops get extremely hot during use and thus, its engineers attempt to architect rugged respiratory systems. While there’s little room to work with inside the unit, there’s always room for error and slack. Without being a ventilation expert, read reviews on your system of choice to make sure others aren’t suffering from heat strokes during frag runs, BEFORE you make the purchase. Otherwise, you’ll see yourself buying supplemental notebook fans that don’t work, or better yet, playing in your fridge.
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Vinny C - December 17th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Thought i throw in my 2 cents.
For the same price of a hardcore gaming laptop you can get an even harder core desktop. SO, you better have a good reason to buy such an expensive beast.
If you plan on leaving it on a desk for 99% of the time, It would not make any sense to buy a gaming laptop. On the other hand, if you plan on going to LAN Party’s a lot, then yea it would make sense, since lugging a desktop with monitor and accessories/wires is a pain.
On the cutting edge side (not released yet) of Hardcore Laptop gaming seems to be leading to a solution based on an External video card. This get rid of heat, size and power issues. Imagine, you have a half decent laptop with core 2 duo and 2-4 gigs of ram but it only has on board video. you wont get very good gaming out of that. Then you buy an external video card that connects over a high speed bus like USB 3.0 or whatever. A real video card, like a regular desktop video card but in a custom enclosure. Now your regular old laptop just became a bad ass gaming machine.
I cant find many recent updates on it but im sure there is a market for this
first unveiled
http://tech.yahoo.com/blog/null/11883
youtube vlog about it later that year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FnHg-k8N3Y
admin - December 17th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
That is a great idea they have. I would love to see this start happening, and I am sure if they were already talking about it, we will see or hear something soon. Nice post!