laptop for gaming

[homeless]

I am going to university abroad so am getting a laptop and I also want to use it for gameplay.

apart from the obvious (graphics, ram and sound card) what spec issues shuld I consider? Ideally I want a small/portable yet powerful one and have narrowed it down to the thinkpad X40 and the new vaio TX.

I know laptops for gaming are never as good as a desktop, but what do you think of the above two to suit my needs?

Thanks

[pearl]

vaio tx

I was looking into buying a vaio tx too for my son, he decided on a desktop in the end.
The vaio tx did look really great though wouldnt mind one for myself! Sorry dont know how good it would be for gaming, although someone did say that laptops in general arent usually the best for gaming.

[randombs]

the problem with laptops and games is you've got to have one or the other - either the things that make laptops great (quietness, weight, battery) or the things that make games great (desktop processor, noisy fans, heavy, crap battery life).

it depends on what sorts of games you'll be playing. i've had an acer travelmate for 6 months that died a few weeks back. it had a pentium-M 1.5 with 512mb ddr and a radeon 9700 pro 64mb and it ran half-life 2 beautifully. but give it the FEAR demo and the scariest thing about that game was that i had to run it at 640x480 with everything set to low!

i got a refund for that one and got this Toshiba M70 widescreen. it's got a pentium-M 1.73, 512mb DDR2 and a radeon x700 128mb (says 256mb but i think it borrows the extra 128 with that hypermemory lark) and the screen is a 15.4" x-black style that is good for games/films but reflects like a normal monitor (personally i don't mind this). it's much better than the regular TFT that the acer had, which would show blacks as greys, and was responsible for many a team-kill in heated counter strike matches

I tried FEAR on it (as FEAR's a recent game and doesn't use tricks like half-life 2 does so is more reliant on brute force) and it runs ok but judders a bit and pauses just before you shoot which is annoying as heck.

the problem with the sony is it's an ultra-portable, so i can't imagine you even running something like the old counterstrike (both my laptops mentioned play counterstrike source smoothly, the toshiba clocks in around 100-150fps at 1280x800 too) as most laptops have onboard graphics which use the system's own ram and this is really bad for gaming.

the toshiba gets around 6500 on 3dmark03's benchmark, whereas my acer got around 3500-4000, and my old pentium 4 2.8ghz w/radeon 9700 pro i had last year got around 3500, to put things in perspective.

figure out exactly what types of game you are going to play. even now i still think i should have not bothered with a laptop with a graphics card like this, as pc gaming for me represents about 1% of the total usage, yet it's determined my last two laptop purchases . i was going to just get an ultra-portable with good battery, low-speed cpu, etc, and then build a cheap tower for my counterstrike games but i saw this and that was that.

if you're going to be playing new games like quake 4, FEAR, etc, and future releases this year, you're going to want a laptop with a regular desktop processor (p4 2.8+) and a high-end mobile graphics card (nvidia 7800, etc), but if you're going to university, you're going to be using it for much more than games and then you'll start to notice all the annoying things that it comes with thanks to it's raw power, like 60-minute batteries, noisy fans, and a hot chassis.

[Supergoal]

I got a P-M 2ghz (P4 3.4Ghz equivalent) laptop with 1gig ddr2 and a Nvidia 7800 GTX graphics card inside which happlily plays FEAR at top end settings.

Although it's more of a desktop replacement and not small as the Sony models, it really does the job as far as gaming and my study goes.

[EvilBoris]

I got a P-M 2ghz laptop with 1gig ddr2 and a Nvidia 7800 GTX graphics card inside which happlily plays FEAR at top end settings.

Although it's more of a desktop replacement and not small as the Sony models, it really does the job as far as gaming and my study goes.

but has it actully melted off you testes when using it on your lap?

something with those specs could easily double as a george forman grill

[Supergoal]

lol. No actually it doesn't

Also it doesn't seem too loud either considering its power.

[Nijo]

I have a M1.7, 1GB, Radeon 9700 from Rock (Pegasus Ti), which has been pretty good. HL2 ran nicely and the FEAR demo was fine at medium detail. My colleague has a Rock Xtreme CT which is the nutz but it weighs an absolute ton. That X-glass stuff is funky though.

[Supergoal]

I got an XtremeCT from Rock too. Don't think I'll ever go back to desktop machines again with laptops this good from now on.

[Resonance]

I have an Asus W3V, Pentium 1.86 Ghz 512 meg ram, Radeon X600. It is quite small and portable. The game performance is so so but I am definately happy with it. I much prefer having it to having a desktop and will get a console for gaming. I cba with the expense of PC gaming.

[homeless]

thanks

well - thanks for all your help on this - I am still holding out for a laptop but hoping to find something cheap in the jan sales and ideally than vaio tx...

we shall see!