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Full Powered, Compact, Gaming Rigs?

Posted by Cliff on from the hard-core-gamer dept.

Michael Buffington asks: "I frequently go to LAN gaming parties, and because I'm not all that interested in toting my higher power mid tower machine around, I bring my lower powered notebook. I want to build a full powered machine complete with a fast, 3.5" HD, CD-ROM, Pentium III or similar in speed CPU, at least 1 AGP slot, and at least 2 PCI slots (or integrated sound, or network, or both), as small as possible. I've considered going the PC 104 route, but don't know of any vendors who sell complete systems (which I'd be more comfortable with, on the PC 104 route), and honestly don't know the pricing on PC 104. I've also considered finding the smallest motherboard I can, and hand building a machine as small as possible with normal equipment (duct tape being part of the 'normal' equipment). Does anyone have any ideas, examples, or stories to help with my new obsession?"

4 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. I normally take... by Jace+of+Fuse! · · Score: 4

    Yup. A Notbook. A fully loaded Dell 5000e.

    128 megabytes of ram (ready for the other 128 megs any day now...) 30 gig HD, 850mhz Pentium III, Rage Mobility 128, 1600x1200 15+ inch display with RatioMetric Scaling, a DVD, and a 3Com CardBus 10/100+56k double height dongle-free Nic/Modem.

    I've found that for almost any game I want to play, this groovy little gig is light, powerful, and a whole lot less trouble than "dragging along my big leather suitcase and my garment bag and my tenor saxophone and my twelve-pound bowling ball and my lucky, lucky autographed glow-in-the-dark snorkel" (well, hey, at least THAT'S what it feels like to drag your whole computer to LANWAR.

    Anyway, I normally get a lot of ooohs and aaahs from the people sitting next to me. Their first reactions are "You aren't seriously going to play on a Laptop are you?"

    But by the time they see me pulling off acceptable frame-rates in Quake 3 they soon realize maybe it's not so bad for games after all. (Just bring along a good mouse, touch-pads blow for games.)

    Incidently, it even plays Black And White fairly well, and of course it plays Diablo II like a dream.

    One thing to note about portables that anybody looking to buy one should keep in mine is the RatioMetric Displays.

    Some LCDs only look good in their native resolution, requiring lower screen sizes to be scaled up into a blocky mess or to be reduced down and not viewed fullscreen.

    ATI's later offerings have used a method where somewhere between the video output and the LCD, any display that isn't full screen is blown up to fill the full LCD with a natural Anti-Aliasing effect. This form of "Mode Promotion" works really well for almost any display mode, though anything less than 640x480 does seem to suffer from a slight blurr, but who uses anything lower than that for games?

    Anyway, the point of this message is that you shouldn't discount very high end Laptops as Lanparty material. Just get over the $5000 price tag of one with good performance and you'll be fine.

    "Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"

    --

    "Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"

    Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
  2. Is this what you were looking for? by aidoneus · · Score: 5

    Here may be just what you're looking for. It's a step by step guide to building a compact Athlon system, small enough that the entire system can be carried in a backpack. For the goatse.cx weary, the link is at http://myhome.netsgo.com/wesleycrushr/Hardware/gui 010405a-1.htm

    Hope this helps.

    -Jason

    --
    If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...
  3. PC-104 stuff by MrResistor · · Score: 4
    You might want to check out Toronto Microelectronics at www.tme-inc.com. They make a lot of PC-104 and other alternative form factor stuff. The full version of their 5811 product has built in ethernet(10/100), scsi(80 pin), vga(and a couple others I'm not familiar with), ide(44 pin, so you'd have to use a notebook harddrive, unless you went scsi), 2 pc100 dimm slots(which I know will support 128MB each), and a socket-7 cpu up to 500MHz/100MHz FSB at a cost of around $1500. You would still need to get a sound module, which I would guess to be around $150. You could fit the whole thing inside a hollowed-out hardcover book, which would be pretty cool. Keyboard, mouse and display would be extra. i think i'd probably go for an lcd, i've seen some for about $1000. You might also look at their PC-in-a-box, which I think is about $3000 and is kinda like an industrial x86 version of the G4 cube. It would end up costing you about the same as a high end laptop. You'd get better performance spending that on a laptop, but there is always the coolness factor that has to be considered...

    --
    Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
  4. Check this out... by cavemanf16 · · Score: 4

    Check out the Virtual Hideout Cool Case gallery. I've linked to a page that has some pretty good internal pics of a case that someone built as a 'LAN party case' out of one of those metallic briefcases (look at the bottom of the page). There's quite a few more pics of similar mods people have done to accomadate LAN gaming, if you have time to look through the 1000+ pics they have in the gallery.