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Mobile vs. Desktop Gaming
Mr.Tweak writes "TweakTown has just posted an article investigating Mobile vs. Desktop gaming in their latest article entitled "New Age Computer Gaming - Mobile vs. Desktop Investigation". The article compares a Dell Inspiron 8200 with ATI Mobility 9000 graphics to a standard desktop system with nVidia GeForce4 Ti4200 graphics. Can notebook gaming really be taken seriously? We think so, and so should you!"
Why a Dell Inspiron? Wouldnt they be better off with something more targeted towards gamers, such as the Alienware 51m Laptop?
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
The biggest problem of mobile gaming is there is mainly one game in town, the radeon 9000. The gf4go is not bad but its not the best either. Mobile has caught up enough but its going to take a while for people to think of laptops as gaming machines.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Of course power is going to be the signigicant factor in mobile gaming. With the newest generation of video cards pushing the limits of even 300 watt power supplies, there's no way the meager 30 to 40 watts of today's high end mobile systems could be ample to power anything even remotely competitive.
But only one problem battery. Yea unless we have long battery lives this wont really do. Most laptop owners will use it for gaming when they have spare battery life. So if we have 20 hour battery backup, which dosent burn you then maybe yes!
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Gotta be playing some pretty shit games if you need that kind of equipment to get much of an experience from them.
Can notebook gaming really be taken seriously? We think so, and so should you!
Now this is freedom of thought.
Don't forget to think different.
We all know that ID didn't want it out because they don't want people to judge the final product on it. I also belive that most people who would download and install it are big fans, and be quite aware that it wasn't representitive of the final product. But when TweakTown publishes frame rates, without even an attempt at a dislaimer, they're not doing anyone any favours.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
do laptop's always seem to be "on the brink" of desktop performance? Do sites just repeat this news item everytime a more powerful laptops come out? The Geforce2go was a major step; this is a normal business cycle advance. The performance of laptops is never anywhere near the performance level of a similarly priced desktop, and that has been static for 15 years, yet over and over again we get reports about how laptops are becoming more and more like desktops... please.
When I am on the road there is no space to pull out my little baby optical mouse and a hard surface to use it on. Tried playing Medal of Honor with the trackpad? Entertaining to say the least.
The keyboard as well leaves a lot to be desired. My Compaq Evo N160 (P3 1.2GHz, 512MB, Radeon Mobility M7) has rediculously sized and placed Ctrl keys. How the hell am I meant to crouch! The test bed for this article however uses a Dell, and I notice that their keyboards are normal in their key placement.
For this reason, gaming is not quite as good as a desktop. Even if the hardware is, (my laptop was quite quicker than my desktop up until recently) the interface is not up to scratch. This sort of includes the LCD monitor, too.
WARNING: This sig does not contain a joke
The real problem with gaming on laptops isn't the frame rate. These days, the type of one-generation-back video chips in portable computers can stil give you a good frame rate, even in modern games.
The rub is the display. LCD's just aren't very good at fast action. The switching times are too long, even on pricy units. Even screensavers tend to ghost and blur on an LCD.
BF1942 is easier to play on a CRT, and will be for the forseeable future. Maybe when new technologies like organic LED's come online, gaming on laptops really will be an option.
Well get a decent pair of headphones like the Sony V700s and you should be fine on any 15inch because your face is typically much closer to the display. There are other issues with LCD displays if you're really that hardcore.
Not true! (oh, and these are my opinions)
;)
My IBM A31 (P4/1600,512DDR,ATI7500/32,15") plays the games I want to play very well!
I get higher framerates in Counterstrike than most of the desktops in my workplace (these are recent Dell boxes), it runs UT2003 VERY well, Q3, AND it allows me to do all the OGL and DX8 development I need to do (ok, without shaders).
I've never been able to play games on a 19" or 21" screen, always preferring 17", so ok maybe 15" inch is slightly smaller than MY optimal, but the portablility more than makes up for that.
Yes, they can get stolen, but so can your desktop! Insurance is a smart thing, some can pay you for loss of data and all sorts of problems.
I agree they're too expensive, but they're also a good tax write-off, the extra cost is worth the portability. I can't take my desktop to my favourite cafe and set it up on the little table now, can I? I am actually most productive in public, something to do with forced concentration. (I am also almost non-productive at my workplace, and fairly productive at home, hehe.)
Don't knock a good laptop. Gee, I was baited, well done!
NetNewsWire into Yojimbo!
Why compare a laptop with a Radeon 9000 to a Desktop with a Radeon 9000 when you can compare it to something totally different and draw your conlusion about laptop gaming from that!
If you're looking at the performance of laptops for gaming, you make your desktop as similar as possible.. same RAM, same CPU speed, SAME VIDEO CARD. Otherwise, it's not truely useful stats.
Too bad they couldn't have tested this one too...
Bringing mobile gaming to new heights
nVidia GPU Delivers Fastest Mobile 3D Performance
Nvidia to launch NV28M at Comdex - The first known notebook design is slated for Q1 next year, from long time Nvidia partner Dell
Or did you go out and buy some Dell stock.
Get a free ipod.
It sure sucks down on batteries, but for a portable gaming machine, it's the shit. A few specs...
- Pentium® 4 @ 2.8GHz
- 512MB DDR SDRAM
- ATI Mobility RADEON 9000
It's dope as shit, plus, you can get the trick (chameleon) paint jobthat alone, in my humble opinion, is worth the price..., but after all, I'm all about the looks (& FPS!!)First things first, let me get this straight. I'm all for frame rates. But i don't like to be elitist about it. 40 plus is fine for me, or anything where it doesn't realistically affect my frame rate.
Laptops do contain some awful video cards sometimes, and that's usually the decision made by the company at the time of specification. Way before actual production. But there are a few that are pretty good. Namely the high range of dells running 9700s and i believe there is a dell with a gf4 chipset in it also.
Say if you are thinking primarily of frame rates, i'm sure you could find something worth buying which wont be an embarrassment at the next LAN party. (I myself have a Dell 250n, and it's wonderful for me).
The main aim with a laptop is portability. If you remember the last BYOC LAN you went to, i'm sure you can also remember the annoying part of getting your pride and joy unplugged from the desk, all into the vehicle of your choice, and then unpacked at the actual location. With a laptop, it goes without saying this kind of affair is an absolute breeze.
That's why i chose my laptop over upgrading my desktop, which now stays at home. Yes, there are some games that take a while to load (namely Battlefield 1942, but i'm sure i'm not the only one facing *that* particular problem), but overall, the tried and tested LAN games (quake 3, UT, CS...) are all perfect for this machine, and many like it.
I noticed a comment about a 5.1 system being unavailable to a laptop. This is untrue, especially with the Creative Audigy external USB soundcard. And anyway, who's prepared to take 6 speakers to a LAN party? Chances are you'd use headphones anyway, and with many laptops carrying virtual surround sound in their chipsets, you could be better off with most desktop owners.
A note on the Alienware a51: i was actually going to buy this machine, but after shopping around (something i normally don't bother doing), i found that there are many better machines, at much lower prices. Realistically, You're paying for a brand.
The story, in a few words: we compare two different computers and find that they both run games.
Woo-hoo. What, were they expecting the laptop hardware to be magically unable to run games or something?
What might have been useful would be to time how long the Inspiron lasts running games off a battery, just for interest's sake. I'm an occasional laptop gamer myself (Inspiron 4100, though), and my battery life drops from 4 hours (per battery - I have two) to about 1.5 hours, when playing games.
In terms of screens, you can get upto 16" screens. Thats more than sufficient for a laptop, me thinks!!. I've got a humble 14.1" that only does 1280X1024, but it's the shit. The 16"s can easily do 1600X1200. So your out of luck there too.
If people love to steal them, protect them for christ's sake.. Don't leave em laying around the airport in Amsterdam. You've got in your possesion an expensive piece of equip.. dont let it slide...
Can't upgrade.. have you heard of mini-pci?? Plus RAM is so easy to upgrade on a laptop...
Money, a laptop is dope as shit to game on when you are on the go..
i recently bought myself a Dell Inspiron 8200. The Inspiron made it because i wanted to have a notebook to play contemporary games with. For Online-Battles against my friends i didn't want to carry my PC even though it's only a Minitower. Surely it won't be the perfect hardware for Doom III, but HalfLife, Civ3, Anno1503 or Mafia all work fine. I'm completely satisfied.
Yours, Martin
The Slashdot effect, or Activision (distributors of id's stuff these days) lawyers?
Dude, you're gettin' a Dell?
Sorry... had to say it.
Mobile gamings is fine.
No, you can't get the top, top, top of the line video card in your laptop; but gone are the days when the laptop sucks compared to the desktop.
I play quake3, warcraft 3, neverwinter nights, etctera, on my laptop with no problems or complaints whatsoever. No, I don't get 300 fps at 1600x1200 in quake3, nor do I really care.
Forgot about the drives in my previous post.
;)
Yes they're horribly slow, my external firewire drive at 5400rpm is a lot faster than the laptop's internal 4200rpm.
BUT! Rescue from slow drives is at hand!
See the following article at Extreme Tech.
IBM will soon give us 7200rpm mobile drives! I see myself spending more money on my laptop next year... Oh well.
Off topic: are the P4M and the ATI7500 in the IBM laptops "removable" at all?
Enjoy!
NetNewsWire into Yojimbo!
Testimony of a Sony Vaio user.
I got myself a Vaio gr314mp nearly a year ago. It comes with a 1200MhZ p3 and the 16meg version of the mobility radeon 7500 and runs a lot of games fine. Multiplayer Quake 3 and Medal of Honour in 1024x768 run at a perfectly playable 30-odd fps (with some smoke effects and alpha-blending off... the card OpenGL drivers need careful tweaking to get good performance.)
My main reason for going laptop was I am on the road a lot, so a desktop isn't feasible for me. I have to say, I'm very chuffed with the results.
I love being able to lie in bed and play computer games. I spent about 2 months playing neverwinter nights on the train into work, and that made the time fly. I've even once or twice played mohaa over wireless while cooking dinner. This shit is great.
But... I don't ever expect to be playing doom 3 on this baby. The big thing is always the graphics card (lower processor speed and ram tend to be acceptable a lot longer), and I don't think I'll be wanting another laptop for games once this one loses its edge, unless I know I can plug in an external graphics card. A year of gaming for about $800 of depreciation isn't quite good enough.
Can anyone tell me why external pci-cards haven't caught on yet? Bus bandwidth wouldn't seem to be an issue if the architecture was right...
As soon as this becomes the norm, or I can swap in a new card when I want to, I will be happy to play on a laptop and pay slightly over the odds for improving game performance. But as it is, the computer I have now will soon be utterly useless in the face of new games.
The mobile gaming idea is superb, and the reality of it is great. Throw longevity in the mix and I'll never go back.
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As long as high-performance chips chew lots of electricity and turn it in to lots of heat, desktops are modular, and laptops remain branded items rather than generic I can't see this situation changing.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
This is absolute rubbish. My Sony Vaio LCD has a fine update speed, and not a ghost of a ghost when running at 60fps (the screen hz) or better.
Well, unless you stare at it for 8 hours plus. After that your eyes start to ghost and blur. That's the real problem.... sometimes its also a useful indication that it's time to go to bed too though...
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If in doubt, visit sometime one of those gaming forums sites, like EsReallity.com. Discussions of input devices do appear there more then often.
Not to mention the fact that I yet have to see at least one gamer (pro prefferably) which uses LCD (or similar technology) monitor. :)
Leonid Mamtchenkov
Then I thought about upgrades.
With a laptop, you're practically stuck with your video card and processor, not to mention CD/DVD drives or sound. Yes, I know it's possible to upgrade these parts, but the cost of them far outweigh the convenience of their desktop counterparts.
A laptop would be great for gaming if, for example, Doom III were never made and the technology required to play games plateaued. I don't see that happening, which is why I'm still using a mini-tower for my gaming needs.
In areas where obtaining top performance is critical, the desktop will always win. This is one of those cases. The designers of laptops almost always need to make concessions, reducing performance, flexibility or other features of the laptop in order to meet the key design goals:
small size
low power consumption
When your goal is to maximize performance, you are not going to give size and power consumption any consideration. The same exact idea applies to wireless networking. Because of FCC limitations and other factors, it will probably always lag behind wired networking.
A laptop is probably adequate for gaming, but many gamers are out for total frames-per-second. And this at any cost...
High End Laptops are performant enough for gaming but simply not modifyable enough for top of the line gaming. Ut2k3 runs only on very recent hardware and matching up to every new gaming with laptops is simply to expensive.e e UT2k3 performance. I doupt a laptop could do that just now. Ironically, people who need top-of-the-line boxes are usually the ones that travel around to LAN partys and Clanwars.
150 Dollars will upgrade my geforce 2 gts to a card that has enough oomph for a 5-people-shooting-at-once-on-CTF-Magma-map-lag-fr
So, no, buying a laptop for gaming is pointless.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Just for the information of the ones that like to flame on people who claim to need 80 fps or more.
FPS isn't the same all the time! When you test FPS in a quick singleplayer it can be as high as 60 and still break in to a useless 10 when you're in a hot pursuit of 3 enemys along with 4 teammates, with everyone firing at maxrate. A max of roundabouts 80FPS minimum is needed if you don't want to notice a performance break when everyone meets for the big showdown in the center of a map. FPS break-in is noticed once it goes below 20 and that will allways happen eventually on a laptop.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I have to admit, I've been lusting after the new Tibooks, which come with the Radeon 9000 mobility video cards. I know that they don't get -all- of the new games right away, but how do they perform on those games they do get?
-Pete
Dear TweakTown (and all web developers (are you listening Tom's Hardware)),
I REALLY don't like having to click through 6 pages to read an article (when it's really slow, it makes me just close the browser). I understand that you like to call it 6 hits, and you get to charge 6 times for the ads, but really. Unfortunately, I got the first page, and left your site because I was not going to keep going through this, even though I wanted to read the article. Could you please stop this.
Love, Spackler
FWIW, Everquest, with all the expansions up to Planes of Power (I gave up on EQ about a month before the buggers released it) ran alright on my laptop, even with all the newer models on. NeverWinter Nights plays great, as does No One Lives Forever and NOLF2. I ran all of these games at 1024x768 resolution, and the only concession I had to make was reducing the effects on NOLF2.
The only reason I'm saying this is that my laptop is a Compaq EVO N115. It was absolute entry level when I bought it in September: 1.2GHz Athlon 4, 256MB RAM, 20GB HDD, 16MB Shared video (up to 32MB, S3 Twister K).
I didn't buy it specifically for gaming, and I scoff at anybody who does buy it specifically for gaming, as the framerate on the LCD is the limiting factor: you'll never get as high a framerate on an LCD as you can currently get on a CRT, because the LCD technology relies on moving of crystals in suspension to draw a pixel.
What I found, though, was that most games are playable if I made a few concessions. They're nowhere near as good as they are on my desktop, with a GF3 Ti500 64MB video card, and I don't expect them to be. But if I'm on the road, or at school, and I get bitten by the desire to play NOLF, I can. And I got that ability without having to shell out $6,000 for a high end laptop. In the end, I paid $2,000 CDN.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Mobile Gaming == GameBoy Advance OR Any damn cell phone
Why a Dell Inspiron?
The reason is simple: Dell has paid TweakTown to advertise on their site. TweakTown needs a boost in traffic to justify to Dell the ad spend so they can say 'See, Mr. Dell, we have lots of unique visitors so its a good idea to continue to advertise with us.' Thats why you should NOT click thru the link and help artificially boost his traffic numbers.
There is a kick-back going to 'Mr.Tweak' for every Dell sold thru the TweakTown site:
click this link, and you'll be supporting TweakTown! .
How much 'investigating Mobile vs. Desktop' do you honestly think went on?
This is the worst kind of whoring (karma-whoring or otherwise) I've ever seen here. And no this is not a troll - its very much a commentary on the problem of having self-proclaimed experts publish their supposedly objective 'investigations' and 'reviews' without clearly stating their obvious conflict of interest from the start.
As many have pointed out below this really isnt an issue. Mobile hardware specs are always going to lag behind desktops and game developers have a tendency to create their best games for the high end (e.g. Unreal Tournament 2003), which means that laptops won't always be able to run the latest games. I'm surprised MrTweak/MrDellSalesman didnt call his Dell infomercial
'Dude! Youre getting a Dell!'
It's an Alpha, which means its full of buggy code and hasnt been optimized to the point where the final product will eventually perform. That also means that any benchmarks run using something as unstable, sloppy and chunky as an alpha are a false measure and therefore are completely unreliable.
The cool factor or street cred he thinks he might gain by using a leaked bit of unstable software as part of the testbed are completely worthless when trying to establish some reliable manner of measuring performance.
As Jericho pointed out, using the alpha demonstrates poor judgement, not only because it's technically unsound (or even for the legal risks), but just as a matter of common sense.
Alienware's 51m is located Here
It comes with the Radeon 9000 pro standard now, and optionally you can get the new P-4 3.06 GHz With HyperThreading.
Hyperthreading is worth it, and this laptop is ideal not just for gamers, but since adobe runs faster on a P-4 with H/T eanabled (see the Tom's video for proof -- 3.06 H/T enabled beats a 3.6 noticably and visually in how long it takes for software to get back to you so you can actually start editing that video/image etc)
I'm really glad to see the Gamer's PC vendors getting into the notebook market seriously though. It's about time serious PC users could get a laptop with Today's cutting edge technology, instead of last years technology from places like dell.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
This is a goatse.cx redirect, with a url long enough you have to copy/paste to notice it.
second of all, it's not even right.
ATI has focused on keeping power consumption low, to reduce the problem with heat dissipation. True, Nvidia is throwing out blast furnace cards that Require an air-intake... but ATI is managing to keep ahead of nvidia, while still sticking to low form factor heatsinkfans instead of 5 lbs monster copper heatsinks that could easily snap the AGP port right off the motherboard, if transported installed.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
The only problem with laptops is that they are difficult to upgrade. How long will a laptop be fast for the newest games? Not every long.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
and a notebook mouse, but both are easily remedied. What I wonder is by the time a notebook gets to be capable won't Ultra Uber Mega Small Form Factor PC's fit in my shirt pocket ? With serial ATA coming, and thinner wafers how long before the concept of a laptop is outdated ?
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Oh yea, the sound of thousands of geeks realizing that got ripped off. Although a true geek would have done his research and found out the supplier before buying.
My impression of my Alienware owners is that they are mostly Posers with lots of money to spend(read:waste) and are the same type of people who ask "what the best speaker I can buy at Bestbuy?"
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I have a friend that bought a laptop like 9 months ago to use for LAN parties. It's like a 1.6, with a GF2 Go, pretty decent size hard drive, and 256mb of ram. At the time the machine was fine, but already the machine is going to be on the lower end of the performance spectrum. The major problem with laptops as gaming rigs is that there is no upgrading the video processor! Had my friend bought a pc, not only would it have been cheaper, but with the money he saved he could have upgraded the video card two or three times! The proprietary design of laptops is what keeps them out of any sensible gamer's top pick for gaming devices. Wouldn't you agree?
The past is just the present only older -me-
Also, something else I'd like add about pro gaming. Check out major gaming championships, like WCG. Which games are played there? Quake III, Counter Strike, FIFA, StarCraft... One of the reasons these games are chosen is because they are popular. Another - they can push the hardware to the limit and make gamers get interested in purchasing newer hardware. Yes, that's right - you need someone to sponsor those competitions. Most of these games are unplayable (seriosly) on the notebook.
I agree with your point about USB devices getting popular. But, if you will have to drag with you Genius PowerWheel with Pedals (don't tell me you play Colin McRay without it :)), Sony headphones, a proper mouse and keyboard for that matter, then using your notebook actually loses any sense. It becomes almost as easy to bring a proper box, using something like GearGrip Pro.
Leonid Mamtchenkov
Sure, I don't have the $'s to blow on a hot new laptop with the latest graphics card, but I've found that a Toshiba Satellite Pro laptop with a fast PIII processor and Trident 3D chipset is good enough for usable gaming with most of the 1st. person shooters.
I used to take it to LAN parties simply because it spared me a need to lug around a bunch of parts including big monitor. I could get their later than most of the other people and still be up and running faster than they were. When it was time to go, it only took minutes to put it all away too.
I can't say for sure if UT2003 will still run ok on it - but games like Age of Mythology do. It ran the old UT just fine, as well as all the Quake games, Half-Life, and others. Frame rates weren't impressive, of course - but playable. To me, that's the main thing.
ATI have released updated mobile drivers for their Radeon series under Linux which fixes the bugs which prevented UT2003 to run.
Can't remember where I read this.
Fantastic.
I bought the Inspiron 8200 about five months ago when the P4-M 2GHz processor first made it to market - it's a 2Ghz machine with 512MB RAM, 60GB HDD, 15" 1600x1200 screen, two batteries, geforce4go 440 64MB, 24x10x24x/8x combo drive and integrated 802.11b Orinoco wireless (they call it a Dell TrueMobile 1150).
I take it everywhere, especially to LANs. It's a heavyweight machine, around 4KG with both batteries inserted. But it's essentially a desktop machine - I use it as my desktop machine for everything including games.
It was a logical choice for me as I run large LAN events such as the Shafted Big Day In and attend LAN events on a weekly basis. It's really, really handy to pick up the unit and head off to a LAN, no lugging large PCs/monitors around which simply aren't designed for it.
It's fast, even at 1600x1200. Quake III Arena, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Halflife (and its mods) run smooth (and I would guess the R9000 would outperform it based on the benchmarks at Tom's Hardware Guide vs. the Geforce4Go 440). UT2003 is a little more demanding without the vertex and pixel shaders of the R9000 so I usually stick to 1024x768 - quite acceptable.
The screen is a nice size. I've decided that anything bigger than a 17" CRT is too big for gaming as your eyes have to move across large areas of the screen too frequently, so in a notebook, a 15" screen is about as big as you would want. The image scaling, as I run my Windows desktop at 1152x864, is very decent and readable on the Geforce4Go 440 although I have read that the R9000 does a FAR better job. Those who are sensitive to high frame rates and refresh rates on CRT screens may find the LCD a bit annoying - it's not the blur effect that one would expect - the Dell UltraSharp(R)(TM)(C) screen has a 9ms rise/16ms fall response time, so as the screen is only statically updated at 60Hz (vs. the 120hz of my 17" display at home), you notice the difference in frames a lot more than a CRT - remember with a CRT, it blurs a lot more so you don't see the frame transitions. So you don't get blur, but it's like watching a movie. Most people don't notice it, in fact, only one other has to my knowledge
It runs Linux. The nVidia drivers work like a charm. It plays games under Linux. I haven't tried FreeBSD yet with the nVidia drivers. While the nVidia site says that the mobile chips are not supported, they are - this is purely a "support" issue, not a driver compatibility one. Oh, and I run at 1600x1200 under Linux - X on a notebook with generous desktop realestate is just way too nice.
For audio, me being a bit of an audio buff, is Dell's major letdown here. They use the Crystal Semiconductor CS4205 AC'97 system which is hardly nice. I do use headphones but the lack of accelerated audio really gives some games a good 5%-10% framerate penalty, even more if the game is badly coded (eg, Battlefield 1942). You don't get directsound 3D or any funky multichannel audio. You do get SPDIF digital out so you can run it to your receiver or 5.1 channel speaker system and do AC-3/DTS passthrough when playing DVDs.
Battery life is nice, realistically, I get around 4.5 hours off a pair of batteries compared to the spec-sheet times of 1.5 hours for Toshiba's equiv model at the time (the Satellite 5100, the current being the 5200 claiming 3 hours but could be a result of a second battery as they added this ability in the 5200). My reasons for going Dell were based on battery life and support more than anything else.
So in short, a great machine that offers pretty much all the basic features of a desktop machine and is an excellent choice for LANners.
Dell offer the C/Dock II docking station which includes full PCI capability. Although you need a Latitude notebook (or an Inspiron flashed with the Latitude bios - The 8200 is the same system board as the Latitude C840 although the Latitude is marketed towards businesses), it goes to show that the capability is there if you really need it, say, for audio or SCSI. The C/dock II includes SCSI as well.
Counter Strike? You think Counter Strike pushes my hardware to the limit? And I'm sorry, but I bet I could play QIII, FIFA and StarCraft very well on my notebook (I don't because no one I know plays them). Seeing as QIII has miniscule system requirements, I don't see how my hardware would be a limiting factor in that.
By seriously, do you mean well enough that your skill is the limiting factor on how well you do, or just getting bragging rights? With any of the games you listed, I could do either in my circles with my notebook.
I can stuff my mouse and headphones in my backpack with the notebook, I don't need a different keyboard and even with a GearGrip, my desktop is ungainly and I'd have to carry a monitor. I also bring all my software in case something goes kerblooie. That and some DVDs for downtime. How is it better for me to bring my HUGE tower along with that stuff when my notebook gets roughly the same (or better) performance?
Also, I don't play CMR2 at LAN parties, and even when I do play, I don't use a wheel. I like CMR2, but not enough to get a controller I can't use with any other game. Especially since I only play it at home by myself.
Hmm, well, it seems you level of game playin is purely on "let me enterttain myself" level. I do not say that I am pro, but I have spent numerious hours on my Q3 skills and playing on the notebook for that matter is simply a disgrace to myself, meaning that I can outperform the monitor, the keyboard, the mouse (or toucpad), and defenetly the sound of the speakers. For the same matter, I can EASILY kick any butt playing CMR2 with the keyboard when I use my wheel and pedals. No question about that.
:) Sorryz.
Consider it a side note, but using keyboard AND a mouse in the FPS game is extremely important, since when you seriosly play the game, keyboard is not able to process all the requests fast enough (everything has it's limit). Same goes for wheel+pedals for CMR2. As to sound, it is as important in Quake3 as sight. I wish I could have bookmarked URL to that demo where two guys duel - one with only sound and another with only sight, and the one with sound wins, both of them being players of the same level.
Bottom line: If me playing on a notebook to be called player A, and me playing on the same level hardware but desktop being called player B: player B kicks player's A's butt easily. Until that's changed, I will not seriosly consider using notebook for playing.
Leonid Mamtchenkov
Besides, if you're that concerned about it, you can add a CRT to the stuff you carry and still have only a fraction of the stuff to carry than if you brought your desktop.
No, I am not saying that. I will actually perform the same on the notebook, if I have my keyboard, mouse, headphones and CRT attached to it. What I am saying is that if I have to carry all that shit around anyway, then it doesn't make much difference wheather I am using a notebook or a normal desktop PC.
Yes, notebook will take a bit less of space in my car, when I'll be on the way to LAN, but desktop PC will give me few more FPS, and I have plenty of space anyways.
You say sound is important, but you think standalone speakers are better than headphones at a LAN party? With other people using speakers in close proximity, how can you hear only what's coming out of your machine?
Maybe it's just me, but on the LAN parties that I attended, there were no speakers what so ever. Everyone brings his/her headphones. And sound IS very important.
I've also spent ours on my AvP2, UT and Worms skills so I can win at LAN parties. I do have other games just to play on my own (like CMR2 and Alice). That doesn't mean I only play to amuse myself.
Respect
You still haven't refuted anything I've said. Just because you don't want to take the time to learn that using a slightly different keyboard shouldn't destroy your skill doesn't mean I'm wrong.
I am a real pain in the ass when it comes to keyboards. Really. Whenever I have to be either precise or productive, I use my own keyboard. Notebook keyboards just don't fit (stupid Function key always gets on the way, small Enter key, small Backspace, etc).
I've addressed all your concerns in my setup, but you still say it won't work. I can't say I have much respect for someone who can't adapt.
Well, the whole issue reminds me the arguments about fuel vs electric cars. While electric cars are about as powerful and fast nowadays as their fuel counterparts, still not a lot of people would prefer them. It's not the tech spec which matters to most. It's the feeling. I get the same ugly feeling every time I have to use a notebook. I can't adopt to using a let's-break-our-fingers keyboard. I can't adopt to is-that-nipple-really-a-mouse thingy. I can't adopt to carrying twenty items just to make myself comfortable and call the thing mobile. You don't have respect for me for that, that's fine with me.
Leonid Mamtchenkov
Ok, you win. I am unable to properly compare due to the period of time between posts, and I am just plain lazy to go back and refresh my memory.
You made good points and I will rethink my positioin and arguments on notebooks in gaming. Thanks for the inspiration.
Leonid Mamtchenkov