What to Look For in a Gaming Laptop
It can be a very expensive proposition to get a lot of high performance components into a gaming laptop. They are always more expensive than their desktop equivalents. Unlike the normal PC that only use single core CPUs, most of these machines have Quad or Dual core CPUs. The additional performance of the Quad or Dual core CPUs makes the games that are designed for this application much more responsive. But, your performance may very because not all games are designed to make full use of the Quad or Dual core CPU technology.
For the gaming PC, the video controller is a crucial component. Although it’s difficult to put a high performing video card in a laptop gaming PCs these days can support video cards that have over 1 Gigabyte of VRAM. The best gaming PC video cards are the Radeon High Definition 5800 series and the GeForce 9800 and 8800M. The Radeon High Definition 5800 series is the most expensive. It will provide amazing High Definition performance and astonishing realism.
The largest compromise in a gaming PC is the size of the display. A 17″ display is the largest you should consider if you want to carry your laptop around in a standard briefcase. The most important features to consider are the brightness and contrast controls, refresh rate, and display resolution. Also if you want to view many DVD videos on your laptop, you need one that has an aspect ratio of 16:9.
The faster and larger faster your hard drive is, the better. Many of the latest games can take up as much as 15 Gigabyte of space on your hard drive. It will improve the performance of your hard drive if you having a lot of empty space. If you have less than 200 Gigabyte it is too small for a gaming machine and 1 Terabyte hard drive isn’t overkill. A rotation speed of 7,200RPM will provide 1/3 faster read/write performance than a hard drive that has a rotation speed of 5,400RPM.
The ultimate in gaming performance is provided by a solid state hard drive (SSHD). A SSHD uses technology that is similar to a USB flash drive or RAM. The reasons the operations are so fast is because are no moving components during read/write operations. However, they are still rather expensive.
A big problem with a gaming laptop is cooling because they heat that is above average. It is essential that you have a user controllable, powerful, large fan. It is also a good idea to have an external lap desk with extra cooling fans built into it.