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Mobile Gaming At Desktop Speeds
DigitalBiscuit writes: "Today's leading edge laptop PCs are packing serious power under their thin
little hoods, enough that even the hard core gamer may sit up and take note.
Here's a full showcase (dismantled to show you the innards) with benchmarks on a
Dell unit that employs NVIDIA's new GeForce4 440 Go GPU and a Pentium 4M (mobile) processor at 1.6GHz. Take one of these babies to the local LAN meet and be the envy of your Mountain Dew chugging cohorts." Of course, this will cost a lot more than similarly powerful desktop, but some people don't seem to mind that tradeoff.
I have a laptop that sports a GeForce chip and it does run games nicely. However, trying to play any serious LAN game on a 15" LCD can be very frustrating. In fact, after a couple of hours my eyes completely bug out.
So, I am still gonna gear grip pro my case and monitor to LAN parties, and take my laptop for someone who shows up empty-handed...
"Before the wreck, I never knew how to type with my face."
I've got a laptop with a GeForce 2 Go and a Mobile PIII 933MHz CPU, and, sure, it's got the power to play games, but the issue is always the display. It's the same with any flat screen...the pixels have a hard time turning off, so whenever the sceen changes quickly, it blurs. So, you may have the hardware, but if the display stinks, what's the point? You'd have to hook it up to a monitor anyway, and if you're bringing along the monitor, you might as well bring along the rest of the box, too. Until laptop displays improve, there isn't much point in playing fast-moving games like FPSs on them.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
good article about just that topic at toms hardware.
:P
Basically the new LCD monitors coming out this summer and towards the end of year are getting very close to whats required for high quality gaming. any monitor with a response time of 20 ms or less will yield at least 50 images per second displayed, and there are quite a few nice ones that you will be able to choose from with thoose kind of times very soon.
just be prepared to whip out close to 2 grand for one
I should tell you that I've taken to doing all my gaming on my laptop because my desktop has some hardware problems and I haven't gotten around to fixing them. So while it's no GeForce 3, it works great. My gaming consists mostly of Counter-Strike. It runs at 1024x768, almost always at 60 FPS. The smoke gernades slow it down, but what do you expect. I should note that the 60 is my refresh rate, and I run Win 2k so it probably maxes out higher. The LCD screen is GREAT and you can see things very well. I doesn't blur during action and such. The only problem is it's impossible to play FPSs with a pointstick or touchpad, so I keep a USB mouse handy. But what do you expect?
The laptop does get warm after alot of CSing, but I'm not suprised. It's not hot at all, and doesn't seem to effect anything. When it does get hot the fan(s) come on, but they are quite quiet and you can't hear them over the game unless you keep it quiet.
Basically what I'm saying is that for what I do (gameing wise), the GeForce 2 GO works great. Considering that this is basically a GeForce 2 MX or so, I'd like to see the GeForce 4 GO, which is basically a neutered GeForce 3. Things are great on the 2D side too. And, yes, I've played Quake 3 and such a few times and it works great as well. No, you're not going to get 200 FPS with 4x AA at 1400x1050 (the native resolution), but then again, it IS a laptop. I should also point out that I game with my AC adapter, not having it might trigger the power miser stuff and slow the GPU down, I don't know.
While I'm on the subject, I'll also point out that the LCD looks great in ANY resolution. I doesn't look like it's been cheesily stretched (like my old Winbook did), it looks like it's the native resolution. But if you don't like it, there is a hot key that displays the image 1:1 on the screen, centered, with a black border around it for non-native resolutions if you want. I prefer full screen (which is nice on a 15" laptop).
In summary, these things work great. I've never tried the ATI, but I bet it would be just as good if not better (but I don't like ATI, and that's another discussion). Before this, my laptop gaming was limited to SimCity 3000, The Incredible Machine, Solitare, and other 2D games. Now I can do all that and headshot people in Counter-Strike from a hotel room without one of those lanboxes-in-a-suitcase.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
While the 8100 and the 8200 are quite similar there a new LCD was introduced with the 8200. While supporting the same native resolution, the newer screen has better contrast, a faster refresh rate and has an even wider viewing angle than the high end screen for the 8100.
You can actually upgrade the Dell 8200. The CPU, the RAM, HD, optical drive and video. The dell document section has all the instructions as well. Not only that, the video card from the 8200 can be used in atleast the 8100.
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