Gaming Laptops Guide

The Ultimate LAN Party Machines?

Have you ever wanted to attend a LAN party but the thought of hauling your machine out of the house makes you feel uncomfortable. Gathering up the cables, case, monitor, mouse, keyboard, etc and hope they don't get damaged during transport.

When you arrive you have carry it all piece by piece to where you need to set up and when the party is over you have to repeat it all over again. This can be especially tiresome if you have a large CRT monitor or large tower case.

If you have a laptop then all you need is the power cord, external mouse, and network cable which all fits inside a carrying case or backpack! You could even take a bus or bike if you wanted.

When you arrive and everyone is busy hooking up their systems and making sure it all works(perhaps some cards or internal cables came loose) you just flip up the screen, turn it on, and heckle everyone else who can't get their system running. Heckling is one of the best parts of a LAN party after all.

In case you were wondering, a LAN party is a get together of gamers who play multiplayer games over a Local Area Network to avoid lag the internet can introduce. LAN party sizes can range anywhere from a small group of friends to a huge event where organizers rent out halls or large conference rooms for tournaments.

Important Parts of a Gaming Laptop

Not just any laptop will suffice for a gamer, we will need a powerhouse to be able to handle the graphically intensive 3D games of today. Some sacrifices will have to be made but they are sacrifices any gamer must be willing to take to be able to frag in convenience! Most notably battery life and weight, yep, that's it.

The biggest factors for gaming are CPU speed and 3D chip speed.

CPU

Instead of a mobile processor, you may want to look into laptops using desktop processors which use a faster FSB(front side bus). The FSB speed determines how fast the CPU can communicate with the RAM and the motherboard chipset, the faster the better.

Mobile Pentium 4 - FSB is 533 MHZ
Mobile Pentium 4 M - FSB is 400 MHZ
Mobile Pentium M - FSB is 400 MHZ
Desktop Pentium 4 - now up to 800 MHZ!

Don't forget the Pentium M Centrino CPU's are nearly as fast as a Mobile Pentium 4-M with 50% higher clock speed. (ex: 1.6 GHZ Pentium M performing as good as a P4-M at 2.4 GHZ in many applications)

64 bit laptops based on the Athlon 64 are now available and provide very good performance. When the operating systems, drivers, and games start to fully support 64 bit you may get even better performance.

Laptops and 3D Graphics?!

It wasn't until recently that laptops began to show excellent performance in games. You will not be able to upgrade the video card in most laptops so you want to get the fastest you can find, support for the latest DirectX* is also a good idea.

With that in mind the best laptop graphics options for gaming are the following:

Nvidia Geforce Go 6800
ATI Mobility Radeon 9800
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700
Nvidia Geforce FX Go 5700
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600

The graphics chips below are more common due to price, but there are some good deals for laptops based on the above mentioned more preferable graphics chips.

Geforce FX Go 5200
Mobility Radeon 9200

* DirectX is Microsoft's multimedia drivers for windows to allow game developers direct access to the hardware.

Video Ram

Many older laptops implemented shared memory where the video card used main system RAM, the drawbacks of this were: the video card could not access main memory very fast, and it reduced the amount of RAM programs can use. This is still common in cheaper laptops not designed for 3D performance.

What you want is dedicated video memory which the graphics chip can access MUCH faster. This shouldn't be a problem if you pick a laptop with any of the above mentioned "best" graphics chips for games.

Other Important Considerations

You will want a minimum of 512 MB of RAM since practically all new systems come with the hog known as Windows XP, aim for 768 MB or even 1 gigabyte of RAM.

A massive hard drive of around 60 gigabytes or more to fit all those huge games is a must, most laptops use 5400 RPM or slower drives to save power but you can find laptops that use 7200 RPM drives.

No one likes to play games using that little square touch pad so make sure to pick up a nice external USB mouse to make beating your friends(or co-workers) easier. On a similar note maybe check out the keyboard size to make sure the keys aren't too small, many laptops do not use full sized keyboards.

Because of the power requirements to run games at full speed you will probably not be using battery power at LAN parties. If you plan to play games on battery power then don't expect full performance since most laptop battery power settings lower the speed of the CPU and graphics processor, if you override the settings and use full performance then the battery will not last very long.

Laptops built for gaming are usually a bit heavier than usual and are considered desktop replacements. Expect weight in the range of 7-10 pounds or more. (which isn't bad considering CRT monitors are 25-70 pounds or more depending on size!)

Last but definitely not least. Get a nice or decent pair of headphones since, except for some models, the built in speakers will pale in comparison to a good set of headphones.

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