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Laptops Designed for Gaming
Take Your Games On The Road.


Laptops designed for gaming are gaining real popularity, despite their cost and their weight they are mostly still really portable and just allow gamers to get together more easily to compete. And with laptop hardware performance always constantly improving that old excuse of being tied to a desktop computer for your gaming will just no longer work.

You could even make the case that gaming is driving most of the latest technology enhancements available such as the dual core processor. And the other new features that are appearing and getting better such as larger hard drives, increased memory capabilities and batteries with a much longer life. And now you can even add a mobile broadband card and log in from just about any location start playing.

Laptop gamers now even have the option of assembling their very own laptops to their very own spec requirements. Use the following guide when shopping for your components so that you can create that serious gaming system for yourself.

VIDEO AND GRAPHICS CARDS

Getting the fastest and most powerful video card is absolutely essential.  Common video graphic chipset's include ATi' Mobility, NVIDIA, 3D Labs, Matrox, STMicro, Trident S3 and SIS. Many top laptops include the ATi Mobility Radeon 9700 which in a laptop provides power with less drain on your battery life. It can also handle the heaviest app's including 3-d gaming, video editing and HDTV display capability.

Always remember most low end and middle of the range priced laptops are supplied with some type of integrated graphics, which simply means that the laptops components will share processing power. Always check the amount of video RAM, or VRAM, that is available in a laptop with any type of integrated graphics before you purchase, because if you don't may get caught with a system that just doesn't have the grunt for the games you want to play.

MEMORY

Always make sure you buy your laptop with the most RAM that is possible up front  it will simply save you on any upgrade costs later. Always ignore the minimum required RAM for your operating system (currently 512MB for Windows XP as of this writing). The minimums are never sufficient for really running game app's at there full capability. 

The more RAM you have the more it will let you run 3-D games and multiple simultaneous app's. You can now find some laptop systems with 3GB of 533 MHz RAM pre-installed. In addition, DDR2 SDRAM is now available and can increase the conventional speeds of SDRAM to 200MHz and up to 400MHz and more. This is important since SDRAM normally maxes at approximately 166MHZ. 

VRAM is video RAM and is additional memory employed by the video drivers on your laptop. Using VRAM gives you the power to play 3-D games. VRAM is not like standard memory because it permits two devices to access it simultaneously, allowing screen refresh and data processing for example. So VRAM will obviously always cost you more than SDRAM. 

PROCESSOR SPEED

Always buy the fastest processor you can afford. CPUs are expensive and your processor choice will always drive a large part of the cost of your system, but don't ever skimp here. Faster processors simply means your system is better able to handle high-demand gaming including 3-D graphics. The impact of a slow processor on games will be that the display will freeze or cause other annoying types of distortion. 

Processor speeds are stated in MHz or GHz, and GHz are faster. On high performance processors you will see speeds of anywhere from 2.4 to 3.4 GHz. While the very fastest processors are not yet available in laptops, you can still find processors that are approaching these speeds.  However it's possible that slower clock speeds will still work dependant on your games spec requirements. But in the end the processors speed is what powers your entire laptop so always invest in the very fastest you can afford.  

HARD DRIVE

IDE drives are very common in laptops and desktops, however these drives use parallel technology which carries your program's data in parallel streams of data bits. A faster technology is the SATA drive which carries data in a single stream and it can provide a data transfer rate of up to thirty times faster than the IDE drive. If you can, choose a SATA drive for your laptop and of course also choose the most storage capacity you can afford. Drives over 100 GB are very common. And hard drives also have speeds measured in RPM, so like turntables - go with the highest you can afford, up to 7,200 rpm.

VIDEO DISPLAY

You will of course want to purchase the best quality display you can. Most laptop displays are of an excellent quality, but always be sure the resolution of your display is compatible with your games and can work with 3-D games as well. 

Displays are calibrated by the number of pixels or dots that comprise your display. The several kind of display resolutions are:

  • SVGA - 800 x 600 pixels. 
  • XGA - 1024 by 768 pixels
  • SXGA - 1280 x 1024 pixels
  • WXGA - same as above, is a widescreen XGA.  All XGA models are higher resolution than SVGA models.
  • TFT Active Matrix Display - TFT means "thin-film transistors".  High-quality laptop computers have TFT active matrix LCD screens (liquid crystal displays).

PUT IT ALL TOGETHER

Ultimately, for a high end laptop gaming system, you can easily spend upwards of $3,000. For the serious gamer, putting together the best system possible right up front means more play before any upgrades will be needed, which means months or years of simply top-quality excitement. 




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