Gaming Laptops

How to Choose a Laptop for Gaming

Cramming high-performance hardware into a laptop form factor is an expensive engineering problem. A gaming laptop will always cost significantly more than its desktop equivalent. But still, you can buy a good gaming laptop in the $1,200 to $1,500 range.

Most gaming laptops feature dual or quad-core processors, unlike ordinary laptops that minimize costs with single-core CPUs. The extra performance of dual-core or quad-core processors makes games designed for this technology more responsive, so you can blast that opponent before he can draw his light saber. However, not all games are designed to take advantage of multi-core technology, so your performance increase may vary. (See my related article Which CPU is Best? for more info on how to choose the right processor.)

The video controller is a critical component in gaming. It's tough to cram a high-performance video card into a laptop, but today's gaming laptops can support video cards with 1GB or more of VRAM, and some even support next-generation dual-card configurations. Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3 are games that get a boost from dual video cards. High end gaming laptop video cards include the GeForce 8800M and 9800M, and the Radeon HD3870. For a few hundred extra dollars, you can bump up to the Radeon HD 5800 series, which sports over 1 teraFLOP of computing power, and offers "astonishing realism and explosive HD gaming performance." How can you NOT want that? J

Display size is the biggest compromise in gaming laptops. If you plan to cram your laptop into a standard briefcase, a 17-inch screen is the biggest you should buy. Some gaming laptops have 20-inch screens, but that's getting into the "portable desktop" size range. Screen resolution, refresh rate, contrast and brightness controls are important features to consider, too. By the way, if you plan to watch a lot of DVD videos on your laptop, get one with a 16:9 aspect ratio. That's the native aspect ratio or DVD movies, so you'll be able to watch movies as they were intended to be seen.

More Recommended Gaming Laptop Specs

The bigger and faster your hard drive, the better. Modern games can take up 15 GB of hard drive space. Having lots of empty space on a hard drive improves performance significantly. Anything less than 200 GB is too small for gaming laptops, and a 1 TB (1,000 GB) hard drive is not overkill. A 7,200 rpm rotation speed provides one-third faster read/write performance than a standard 5,400 rpm drive.

Solid-state hard drives are the ultimate in gaming laptop performance. A SSHD uses technology similar to RAM or a USB flash drive. There are no moving parts so read-write operations are blindingly fast. But SSHDs are still very expensive. You may want to wait until their prices drop.

Cooling is always a concern with laptops, and it's a bigger problem with high-performance gaming laptops that generate above-average heat. A big, powerful, user-controllable fan is essential. An external lap desk with extra cooling fans built into it is also a good idea.

If price is no object, the Visionman Widow WGMI-4SG200 Gaming Laptop ($6295) is a top of the line gaming rig. It features a quad core CPU, 18.4-inch display, 4GB of RAM, 80GB SSD Boot Drive, an additional 640GB SATA hard drive, and dual GeForce 1GB video cards. A more economical choice would be the Dell Alienware M15X ($1199), a 15.6-inch model that comes with an Intel i3 dual core processor, 3GB of RAM, a 512MB video card and a 250GB SATA drive.

Do you have a gaming laptop? Post your comment or question below...