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High Performance Gaming Laptops On A Budget?
Cory Tunney writes "In my quest to find a gaming laptop that will fulfill my gaming fantasies, but not kick me in the wallet at the same time, I've come across many options. Alienware is out of the question, as are companies like VooDooPC, but out of the rough comes companies less known but with impressive hardware. Sager seems to have won over a pretty large group of fans, and iBuyPower also seems to put out a decent amount of bang for the buck. However, when it comes down to it, I am still left with several options and I do not know what road to travel. So here's the jist of it - a system with a price tag around $2,000, a high-end video card (Radeon or the equivalent NVidia) and a system with an AMD would be a plus, but I will not rule out Intel if they can offer similar performance. So, Slashdot readers, what systems can you recommend?"
This is something I've been wondering about, and since it's on topic (at least slightly) I'd like to ask: Can anyone tell me how well the current 15" PowerBooks work for gaming? I'm seriously looking at them to replace my 4 year old Dell but I'd like to be able to play games now and then.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
My powerbook cost around $2000 (admittedly after student discounts). The slick bugger tends to perform quite well with anything I've thrown at it. I can't wait to play DOOM 3 on it!
transmission_err
Get the components you like, and put it together yourself. 2000 bucks is more than enough to build whatever high-end gaming box you need.
Dude, you're getting a dell.
Seriously, get an 8600 with whatever the best graphics card they offer now happens to be. You can find coupons at get a 1.6 or 1.7 centrino at a pretty decent price. You will be more than happy. It runs Farcry better than my desktop (which is a p4-2.8ghz with a gig of ram). And their warranty is just icing.
schild
editor, f13.net
" So, Slashdot readers, what systems can you recommend?"
A desktop computer and a midget to carry it around?
To be honest, I haven't checked benchmarks for it yet, but I just purchased a Dell Inspiron 5150 (should arrive on the 18th). The reason I picked this one in particular was that it was dell's lowest-priced laptop that still had decent video hardware.
The specs I got were as follows:
- 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 HT
- 15" SXGA+ LCD
- 512 MB RAM
- 60 GB HD
- 64 MB nVidia GeForce FX Go5200
Adding a more powerful battery and a 4x DVD burner put me up to CDN $2200 after tax and shipping.
The 5150 on the US website starts at 256 megs of ram, 3.06 GHz P4, 15" XGA at $1079 after a 10% discount.
Another Dell option is $2319 USD after 15% off (about $400 savings) for the Inspiron XPS - a little more than your target price, but the specs are impressive to say the least.
I don't know how well my system is going to handle games - they're mostly a secondary priority, and the system is going to have enough power to run FFXI at least, so that's all I'm really concerned about - but as far as a mixture of cheap and effective (assuming you're not going to want to play Doom 3 on it), Dell is probably the best way to go.
I'm sorry, but you have GOT to be kidding me. You just can't realistically find that in your price range. Sure, you can skimp out on HD space, or maybe drop the pre-installed software, but as soon as you sacrafice a brand name, you lose things like a decent warranty, and quality parts.
Bottom line.
while true ; do echo this is my sig; done
I know this isn't exactly on topic, but don't get a laptop for gaming. My last two computers have been "gaming" laptop. It just isn't worth it. It really isn't. The cost of a laptop is so much higher than a desktop, and the performance is so much lower. A Geforce4Go 5600 isn't anything like a Geforce 5600 FX. Laptops are essentially crippled by their graphic cards, no matter how hard Ati and nVidia try otherwise. My biggest argument against laptop is that the graphic drivers aren't updated. nVidia specifically states on their driver pages that laptop users should get updated drivers from their manufacturers. Maybe this issue is limited to Toshiba, but my graphics card's drivers have not been updated once by Toshiba since I bought my laptop a year ago. If you get a laptop, it will be fine for the first 6-8 months, but as soon as new games come out which rely on updated drivers, you will start missing out. I've tried upgrading my drivers, and all that does is create sub par performance and quite a few artifacts. Simply put, the graphic drivers are not optimized for laptops.
I am shopping for a sub 2000 dollar laptop myself and the ABS Mayhem 2 looked like a winner. It is pretty light and sports nice hardware, however I haven't really seen any reviews for it so I don't know if they are supposed to be any good. http://www.abspc.com is the site.
the fact of the matter is, you will get no battery life. u're gonna have to be jacked in to power. if u're gonna be jacked into ac, u might as well just build a pc that fits into a backpack and buy the best lcd u can with u're $$$. you will get better performance for u're buck.
Mayhem. Nice stuff outfitted with ATI Radeon Mobility 9600 or 9700s. Your choice of Intel Pentium 4, Pentium M, or Athlon64, in order of least-to-most expensive. I'd go with the Pentium M version, based on your budget. The Athlon64 machine is $2100 with only 512Meg of RAM, whereas the Pentium M model is $1900 with 1Gig of RAM. That would also leave you enough money to upgrade to the 7200rpm HD.
I know you say you're looking for a laptop, but for that price range, you're not going to find what you really want.
/much/ less than a laptop. The downside is that you'll need to haul / find a monitor wherever you go.
I'd say build yourself a small form factor pc. The plus side of this is that you get something that's still portable and will cost
I have a Shuttle SN41G2 (http://www.shuttle.com/) and it works wonders.
If you have a problem and call or email for support, alot of publisher's call centers will just get rid of you since laptops aren't generally supported. Its not enough reason alone to not get the laptop if you see enough pluses to it, but it is a factor to consider.
I haven't checked them out for a while, but these guys seemed to have good prices: http://www.powernotebooks.com/
The NP4790-C seems to be a good deal, and just under the $2000 you wanted to spend.
UNIX: Find it, fsck it, forget it.
wtf? read the summary much?
I've had this sig for three days.
check out powernotebooks.com, you can get something REALLY good for about 1700
So, I'm now curious as to whether the story and this comment are just an astroturfing scheme.
May we never see th
I have the E-Machines M6811 from Best Buy for $1600 after Rebate.
AMD Mobile Athlon 64 3400+
512 MB PC2700
80GB HD
Radeon 9600 64MB
15.4" WideScreen
DVD+-RW
4 USB2.0
1 1394
Plays UT2004 Great!!
I've got a Sony Vaio laptop with an AMD Athlon. It works fine for most games, although it freezes frequently and crashes once in awhile too, but i have no idea if that's Sony's fault, AMD's fault, or Microsoft's fault.
However, i've been trying to get Master of Magic and Master of Orion running on here for awhile. Both the Windows XP emulation mode and VDMSound report that there isn't enough expanded memory to run the program, no matter how much virtual expanded memory i set up in the preferences for either program. DosBox works, but is painfully slow for both programs. VDMSound is supposed to be faster than DosBox, but i couldn't get the memory error to go away.
After poking around on a lot of forums someone finally mentioned that some (all?) AMD motherboards have problems allocating EMS and there was probably no way to get VDMSound or the native emulation working.
Disclaimer: I am not a hardware person, and i don't know if the information is accurate or which chipsets/motherboards have the problem, but it certainly matches the difficulies i've been having. If you plan on running any DOS games in emulation, you should probably look into the issue more. (It's kind of a moot point for me since i can't aford a new computer until i find a job.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Seems to get pretty high marks (though I've never bought from them.)
They sell the Sager laptops that I believe Alienware sells, but without fancy paint jobs, for a grand or so less. I've done price comparisons but don't really need a "gamer" spec laptop.
No sig for you!!
The Sager is good for things like Half-Life, but anything recent like Far Cry will kill it instantly. There's just no comparison between graphics cards for FPS. However, it plays Total Annihilation like no-one's business.
If you want a games machine, get a small form factor PC. Arstechnica has a handy buyer's guide, and the hot rod comes out to less than 2K (although w/o monitor).
Generally you pay 2X for a laptop what you'd pay for a PC equivalent. For $2000, you'd be better off just buying a $1500 gaming PC and a $500 laptop to do work on. Towers, especially with LCD displays, can typically be carried in a backpack (normal cases) or smaller (small form factor). Battery life really isn't an issue since a gaming laptop dies after about an 1-2 hours anyway.
That, and you can't upgrade laptops easily. It's cheaper to go buy a reasonable GFX card (~$200) and then buy a new one when you need it for a game than buying $600 card to start out with. You don't have that freedom with a laptop.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
9 times out of 10 this is the best deal on desktops and laptops anywhere, especially when you consider the quality of what you're getting (I'm sorry, but Dell is better than most of these fly-by-nite operations by a long shot). The inventory changes almost daily, so if they don't have what you want, try again the next day.
That being said, I *have* had a Dell refurbished part fail on me, four months after purchase. Of course I thought "well, you can't get something for nothing..". However, after a quick chat with customer service they had a replacement on my doorstep two days later, with a RMA and a box for the old part. I'm so happy about this that I'm writing this post.
If I had the money, I would seriously consider a laptop from Hypersonic-PC. They seem to have decent priced gaming laptops.
The other day I was amazed to find a sweet widescreen (15.4") laptop with an AMD 64, 512 MB of ram a Radeon 9200 mobile (or something similar) for around $1400 (if you trust the rebate). Perhaps a bit underpowered for Doom 3 but it looked decently mobile enough. Might be a bit lower than what you were shooting for but it would certainly be close, and you could by several games/accessories with the savings.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
eMachines M6811
athlon64 3400+
512mb ram
mobility radeon 9600
80gb hd
dvd+/-rw
usb2.0/firewire
802.11b/g
$1699
Unless you go the XPS route, the best ATI gfx card you can get seems to be the 9600. The XPS thing lasts under an hour, and weighs in at something like 8 lbs. Granted, that's what you get for a gaming laptop, but I'm trying to shoot for the middle ground somewhere between there. I also want a somewhat normal aspect ratio instead of these wide screen laptops...
There is no such thing as a "High Performance Gaming Laptop On A Budget"
"It was hell!" recalls former child.
As several other posters have noted, eMachines offers zippy laptops well under $2000 (under $1500 with rebates from Best Buy). I've been running a model M6805 since January; it's my eighth laptop and it's by far the best I've had (including Apple, Compaq, Dell, and HP). Memory board shorted out in March -- cause it wouldn't be a computer if I didn't have to have it repaired/returned within the first 90 days -- and had to ship it back for remplacement, but turnaround time was 48 hours. Other than that, it's been a perfect machine. It's the very first time I can play current games on my laptop. With its exceptionally fine and wide screen, the 6805 is both big and heavy (comes close to 10 pounds), but it's a good tradeoff; I'm also running dual boot with SUSE 9.1 with no major problems except power management is funky under Linux. Here are the specs:
deon 9600 mobility graphics solution, DVD/CD-RW, wireless and more. Here are the full specs:
Display: 15.4" Widescreen TFT LCD WXGA (1280 x 800 max. resolution)
Operating System: Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition
CPU: Mobile AMD Athlon(TM) 64 3000+ Processor
64-bit Architecture operates at 1.800 GHz
System Bus uses HyperTransport(TM)
Technology operating at 1600 MHz
1 MB L2 Cache
Memory: 512 MB DDR SODIMM (PC 2700)
Hard Drive: 60 GB HDD
Optical Drives: DVD/CD-RW Combo Drive (24x24x24 CD-RW; 8x Max. DVD-ROM); Media Reader (Compact Flash, Micro Drive, MultiMedia Card, Secure Digital (SD), Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro)
Video: ATI® RADEON(TM) 9600 Discrete Graphics with built in 64MB Video RAM
Sound: PC2001 Compliant AC '97 Audio
Built-in Stereo Speakers
Modem: 56K* ITU V.92 Fax/Modem
Network: Integrated 802.11g Wireless LAN (up to 54Mbps); 10/100Mbps built-in Ethernet
Pointing Device: Touchpad with Vertical Scroll Zone
Battery: 8-cell Lithium-ion (Li-ion)
Dimensions: 1.6"h x 14.0"w x 10.4"d
Weight: 7.5 lbs. (8.65 total travel weight)
Internet: AOL 3 month membership included, click here for details
Ports/Other: 4 USB 2.0 ports, 1 IEEE 1394, 1 VGA External Connector, 1 S-Video Out, Microphone In, Headphone/Audio Out, 1 PCMCIA Slot (Card Bus type I or type II)
Pre-Installed Software: Microsoft Works 7.0, Microsoft Money 2004, Encarta Online, Adobe® Acrobat® Reader(TM), Microsoft Media Player, Real Player, PowerDVD, Internet Explorer, Roxio Easy CD & DVD Creator (DVD Edition), BigFix®, MSN®, CompuServe®, AOL 9.0 (with 3 months membership included**), Norton AntiVirus 2004 (90 day complimentary subscription)
The 9100 actually has support for the Radeon 9700 or the new mobility Radeon 9800 (which just screams) although the latter will delay your shipment by about a week.
High performance, laptop, cheap. Choose any two.
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
Excellent performance for an unbeatable price! Check out the all-new series of P-P-P-Powerbooks!
Operating System:
Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional
Processor:
Low-power mobile AMD Athlon(TM) 64 processor 2800+
Memory:
512MB (256/256)
Hard drive:
80GB
Optical drive:
(Slot loading)Super Multi Write Plus (DVD -RW, +RW, -RAM)
Display:
15.0" TFT SXGA+ (1400 x 1050)
Graphics:
ATI® MOBILITY(TM) RADEON(TM) 9700, 128MB DDR
Connectivity:
802.11b/g WLAN, Bluetooth(TM), Gigabit LAN, V.92 modem, 4-in-1 card reader, infrared, 4 USB 2.0 ports and Firewire.
Did I mention that it's RED?
CyberPower Xplorer X64-8000
I don't know about tech support or quality (never bought from these guys), but you could configure a nominally good gaming laptop for about $1700.
Athlon64 3200+
1GB RAM (the low-latency Corsair stuff, even)
Radeon Mobility 9700
802.11g mini-PCI
XP Pro (wimp...)
$1774.00
Again, on paper this is a steal. YMMV.
As of the 2.6.7 kernel, all of the stupid bios issues with this laptop are fixed, so you can turn acpi and speed governing on and it works. The only problem I still have is that it doesn't know when I plug it in or unplug it without restarting acpid (doesn't affect charging, just power profiles and the battery meter)
My company used to seel Sagers about 10 years ago. Yes they have been around that long. We had to take back more systems with them than I can count. It was a nightmare to deal with them. Unless you know for a fact that they have changed I would stay far a way from them.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Actually for gaming Centrino is a twosided sword. The Pentium-M kicks with 1.7 GHz every other Intel Prozessors butt, litterally spoken. This thing is faster than a 4 GHz P4 and uses only a fraction of energy the P4 uses. But most centrino notebooks blow the gaming performance away with the dog slow and under linux rather problematic i855/xTreme2 graphics processor. Which is fast enough for occasional games (nwn still runs ok on this one) but never try it for high end gaming, you will end with a slideshow.
what kind of video card do you have in your desktop that you get such low performance on farcry?
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
Fast / Cheap / Good
Pick two. You cannot have all three. This is a universal law of computing (and life in general).
PC Torque has about the best customer service in the laptop industry. They sell both Sager and Acer notebooks. I got a Sager 5680 from them a year ago and it has been the most solid machine I've ever owned (and I've owned A LOT of machines, from Macs to store-boughts to homebrew). You aren't going to find a better place to discuss laptops than NotebookForums.com.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
First, understand this -
For whatever amount of money you spend on your laptop, a desktop built with the same amount of money will be roughly 1.5x - 2x as powerful, no contest.
However, you can still have a very decent gaming experience with a laptop.
First decision - Screen Size.
If you get a laptop that has a widescreen, some games will support it natively - but MOST WON'T. Either your game will be distorted, or you'll have vertical bars on the side of your game. Look for the W in front of the description to figure out whether a laptop is widescreen or not.
Widescreen IS actually better for playing DVDs and actually doing real work though. The best screen I've ever seen on a computer, ever, was on a widescreen SONY VAIO with that weird reflective technology. Look around in CompUSA or Circuit City for one of those, it's really amazing looking.
Second decision - Screen resolution:
If you play games at the native resolution of the laptop, they will look sharper. This is a warning for you folks looking at laptops with a screen resolution of 1450 x 1050 - not many games support that resolution natively. The lower the native resolution of the screen, the better your framerate will be, but the games will look worse - but not as bad on a laptop that's actually high res, but displaying in low-res.
Third decision - CPU.
Basically, you have three choices - you spend a lot of money on a Pentium 4-M that's super-fast, but chews up batteries in mere minutes, you spend some money on an AMD Athlon 64 laptop that gets good performance and "decent" battery life, or you spend a lot of money on a Pentium-M that gets good performance and excellent battery life.
Most games aren't CPU dependant these days - if you get a mobility Radeon 9700, there's no earthly reason to get a processor that's faster than a Pentium-M at 1.7 ghz.
Fourth decision: GPU
If possible, get a Mobility Radeon 9800 when that comes out. That thing is based off of the desktop Radeon X800, and is almost 80% faster than the Mobility Radeon 9700, which is basically a Radeon 9600 XT, and the best mobile gpu you can get right now. Don't bother with Nvidia - it can't compete performance-wise with ATI chipsets on laptops.
Fifth decision: RAM size. 512 mb is sufficient for most purposes, and you really won't notice the difference much by going higher. 1 gig is probably overkill, but if it's cheap enough, then why not?
Regarding hard drives, I would go for slower-but-bigger over faster-but-smaller. Sure, the load times will be longer, but a faster hard drive will chew up batteries. Don't get a RAID array on your laptop, that's a really, really bad idea.
For 2k, go with a Pentium at 1.7 ghz with a mobility radeon 9700 with 512 mb of RAM, a 15-inch SXGA+ screen, and a Radeon 9700 card - I know someone who's played through Doom III on one of those using only a touchpad. It should play all currently released games very well.
the Emachine M6811 (made by Arema, same guys who supply Voodoo laptops) goes for around $1600 after rebates. I've been setting it up for Linux, but it plays all the high end game just fine and is very overclock frindly on the AMD64 fsb and the ATI mem and core.
How long ago was this? What model was it? The M68xx series of e:machines is very capable. I am running Doom 3 quite well on my M8605.
Journal
They are made by the same company. Hardly anyone (even some of the 'top tier' companies like Dell) make their own laptops. They contract with some Tawainese OEM and then put their own decorations & company literature in the box and ship it to you.
I own a Ferrari 3200 and I must say it's the best damn fucking laptop I've ever owned. I'm not sure how Acer managed to pull this off, but it's one hellava quality notebook. Everytime I bring it to work, I get all sorts of comments. All of the been positive to boot too.
And sure, laptops come and go in the marketplace. But even after your Ferrari 3200 becomes "outdated" in a few years, it still will be RED!
Warning: If you do not want public attention, do NOT buy this laptop.
Life is not for the lazy.
Wow that laptop looks pretty sweet, if Toshiba made a Ferrari themed laptop I'd buy.
The 5150 is the preferred laptop of Edward Van Halen!
Rock on!
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
I've recently purchased and HP Pavillion zd7000, and love the thing. You can customize it from the web site with lots of nice options. Previous to this I had a Toshiba P25-507.
The Toshiba had a 32 meg nVidia go5200. The HP has an option (which I took!) for a 128 meg nVidia 5700! I only play Second Life, but the difference is STAGGERING. It also has an option for a new brightview screen, 16:9 ratio, 1680x1050 resolution - GORGEOUS. You can also get a 7200 RPM 60 gig drive with it... built in wireless, etc, etc. I went with a 3.2 ghz processor with hyper threading. It performs WONDERFULLY. All this for a tick under $2000...