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The FragBook

Posted by michael on from the lap-burning-goodness dept.

Petaris writes "For all of you hard core gamers out there a new choice is availiable for gaming notebooks. Introducing the Falcon Northwest FragBook. This notebook will be in direct competition with gaming notebooks from several competetors including Alienware and VooDoo. Falcon-nw, VooDoo, and more recently Alienware are the place to look for insanely high end and usually fairly expensive gaming systems. The gaming notebook, a more recent arrival in the industry, promises more recent processors than are commonly available for notebooks. Just make sure you stock up on batteries or settle in next to an outlet. :)"

2 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Re:raid in a notebook?!? by kfg · · Score: 5, Informative

    No, you don't use it for striping in a gaming system. It's purely a hardware failsafe. Level 1 mirroring. Pure redundency.

    You only need to spin the drive when you write to it, which in a gaming system is a very occasional occurance. We're not talking "Enterprise" order processing database here. We're talking writing back to the config file after a gaming session is over and the ability to switch to that drive if the primary drive fails while actually gaming.

    So it's a drain on the battery, but nowhere near twice the drain.

    And I certainly never said that using a laptop for a LAN party makes a lot of sense anyway.

    KFG

  2. Re:I tried by jollis · · Score: 5, Informative
    Disabling vertical sync can help, since it unclamps FPS from your monitor refresh.

    A few hints on the fps/refresh subject:
    • For Q3A/RtCW engine based games, there's a console variable called 'r_displayRefresh'. This allows you to have the game set its own display refresh. I personally use r_displayRefresh 120 @ 800x600x32. Make sure you don't exceed your monitor's specifications.
    • Disabling vertical sync can greatly improve game performance for those stuck with low refresh rates. For example, one can easily do steady 125+ FPS while the monitor runs as 60Hz.
    • Use a mouse with a decent sampling rate and/or check its settings. Choppy performance (during turns especially) can often be attributed to low mouse rates and not frame rates.