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High-Resolution, Anti-Glare LCD for Gaming Laptop?
Kra Z Joe asks: "I've been having difficulty locating a laptop that has an anti-glare, WSXGA 15.4" or WUXGA 17" display AND a gaming-capable graphics system. As for anti-glare displays, I can find the standard WXGA 15.4" screens on laptops with graphics systems capable of running today's games, and I can find the higher resolution displays used with either an integrated Intel 'Extreme' graphics system, or some dedicated 'business' graphics systems. Unable to locate a major brand PC that meets my requirements — I've also attempted to find an add-on anti-glare product to use with those glossy-screened laptops. It seems that nobody makes a working product without also tacking on some type of 'privacy' guard, or some plastic frame that would prevent me from closing the laptop. Does anyone know a reputable laptop maker that would like my money, or where I can find a good anti-glare covering that works without limiting my ability to view from the side?"
Move out of your mother's basement, realize that games are for 12 year-olds, get a job, and use a normal computer like everyone else.
I am always gaming from a side view.
Sager or any other fine Clevo-designed laptop. It's offered that which you seek for years.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
The MacBook Pro 15" has WSXGA and comes in a matte finish.
ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card
http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/
Get a slightly oversized anti-glare screen and instead of mounting it over your laptop screen, just sit it on the laptop's hinge area in front of the screen. When you're packing up, take it off and stick it back in its cardboard box.
my dell precision m90, 2gb ram, 512mb video, 1920x1200 does anything (30+ fps in oblivion etc) with any game on the market
no glares in my laptop
http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/notebooks/thinkpad/z-seri es/index.html The Z61p model there is probably the best laptop that suits your need at a reasonable price.
^^^ Thats the laptop I use. Its got an integrated MX440. Its defintiely not most powerful GPU, and it cant even render Direct X higher than 7.0, but it does play CS:S well (minus HDR) and has a no-glare 17" 1280x1024 display.
"Gaming" is a pretty broad term. I play CS:S and its not too strenuous on the graphics card. Then again, there are laptops that rival gaming rigs costing several thousand dollars. How much performance do you really need out of this laptop?
How about a MacBook Pro? Available with a non-glossy anti-glare screen and a 256MB ATI Mobility Radeon X1600. When booted into Windows, it can run Half-Life 2 at native screen res with all options set to high and 6x anti-aliasing without breaking a sweat. Runs World of Warcraft with everything maxed in either WinXP or OS X.
http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/
HP nx9420 17" 1440x900 or 1680x1050 glossy or matte, X1600, FX 1500M, or NVS 510M. Starting at $1229.
Mine is T2500, 2GB(667), 1680x1050 matte, X1600 w/ 256MB, 80GB 7200RPM, DL 8X DVD-R, 3945 a/b/g w/ bluetooth. It's great. Lighter than my old 15". Gets around 3.5 hours battery life playing movies or surfing. It handles Oblivion and HL2 at decent resolution with most of the eye candy on.
It's hard to find a decent laptop w/o a glossy screen. I looked for weeks before I decided on this model. I would have preferred a slightly better video card, but I couldn't pass up the deal I got on this one. I've been trying to find specs/pricing on the NVS 510M. It just showed up as an option and I can't find anything solid on it. My guess is that it's similar to a 7900GS. If so, I might swap out the X1600 one of these days.
I have a Sager (NP3880) with 2 gigs RAM, 2.13 Ghz processor, Geforce 6600 graphics card, etc. It's pretty damn awesome, still a hugely powerful machine a year and some after I bought it. However, it has a real overheating problem, and I've had to send it in for warranty work twice due to the motherboard's power supply dying, and I'm a computer tech at my school and can usually deal with hardware issues.
I'd suggest getting an Acer myself, the Aspire 5000 line. Just go for the newest one. I have a friend with a Ferrari, which is just great. The Aspires are the same thing with less advertising crap, and thus cheeper. They seem like great computers, and if I could sell the on I had and get a little bit of money, I'd totally buy one now.
One thing to say in Sager's defense, they've been really great in helping me with my warranty stuff.
Start looking here http://forum.notebookreview.com/
When you use glare blockers, the point is to remove or reflect away as much incoming light while trying to keep the outgoing light as intense as possible. One solution to this is to remove incoming light by angling '_/_' the reflective material so that light coming in from an angle relects away from observer viewing the screen from center position. This makes light relecting 'out' of the glare blocker just as weak at those same angles. This is why you can barely make out the picture from the side. The light has been trapped inside blocker.
I can't think of a decent glare blocker that wouldn't apply either depth or angular constraints on the display. Unless I've got my theory very wrong, you're asking for a glare blocker that doesn't do what glare blockers do.. erm.. yeah....
The only other hope you have is to boost the source lighting from the laptop. Maybe you should buy a super high intensity iris burning LCD. That'll cancel out most ambient lighting as well as turn your eyes into two little meat balls =)
Bye!
With Bootcamp, these should run great. My gf got a new 20" iMac with the 256mb ATI card and 1GB memory. Seemed to work fine with any reasonable settings. No it wouldn't do FEAR at max settings, but even oblivion was quite playable. I'm sure that soon enough Paralells and other companies will even have the games running natively in OS X soon enough.
Plus, you have the great options of OS X, Windows XP/Vista, and Linux. The new Duo 2 chips are killer fast, and they really are solid machines. I'm typing this on my iBook G4 that i've had since they came out. In the same time, my parents have gone through 2 Sony laptops and an HP. The iBook is still rock solid and does all my general (non gaming, non 3d intensive) day to day work perfectly. I have a good desktop, so as a laptop this is as good as it gets.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
I have an Acer Aspire 5672WLMi and it's pretty good as a gaming system for my needs. It plays HL2 and CS:S admirably at the display's native resolution of 1280x800. Mine has a core duo T2300 (1.66GHz dual core), 1GB of RAM, and a Radeon X1400 (newer revisions come with an X1600)
2 E16834115246
The screen is a little glossy, but so far it has not proved to be a problem for me, though there have been times when some sort of anti-glare coating would be nice.
The price isn't too bad, either. I gave just under $1100 for it.
Here is a current version of it on Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8
This whole glossy screen thing seems like a very unfortunate fad. I know, glossy is better for watching movies -- is that really the primary use that most laptops are being sold for???
I think we (those of us who don't always use our laptops in the dark) need to let the manufacturers know that there is still a significant fraction of the market for whom glossy screens are unacceptable, period. It's just nuts that you can't get a 17" 1920x1200 laptop from Dell with a matte-finish screen.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
I found a barebones WSXGA+ non-glare MSI-1039 on eBay for $600USD. It'll take a Turion-64 and up to 2 gigs of pc3200 DDR, and it has a 256mb Radeon x1600. It runs really hot though, but it's my dream (realisticly speaking) gaming laptop. MSI-1039 Product Sheet
I should really point out the Omega Drivers are just the same drivers you download from ATI, but with various default settings changed (obviously they are not new drivers at all - yet the guy who distributes them seems to go out of his way to give the opposite impression). You can change all the settings that make a significant difference via the ATI control panel anyway - and other 'hidden' registry settings (which are largely hidden by ATI for good reason, though admittedly it's nice to be able to tweak them for compatiblity with the odd very old title) by using a number of utilites (including at least one GNU utility).
The Omega Drivers actually just lower the quality of the graphics, which is why they are 'faster' (they toggle on less intensive texture filtering, 'faster' smoothing rather than 'better' by default, that sort of thing). They are really popular with the 'gaming kids' on forums who can't be bothered to RTFM and don't really understand they are not actually 'new drivers' but the same old ATM drivers with different settings on by default (usually I end up getting called a "stoopid n00b" for my troubles, apparently they don't know much about writing drivers, nor do they notice that the textures in their games suddenly don't look not quite as good, I guess they think he just smarter than all those engineers at ATI, though actually going by the GUI for the Windows ATI drivers I can almost see how someone might think that, at least the Mac OS control panel is pretty awesome IMO).
I only mention this because running drivers packaged by anyone other than the provider in this case is pretty bad idea IMO - by playing with various (usually nailed) settings forced on/off that a vendor is not going to have tested against you are much more likely to run in to compatiblity problems.
I completely agree about running OEM drivers in favour of generic ones though. Both on Windows and Mac OS more often than not I've found that downloadable generic drivers perfom better and have more features than the bundled drivers (pretty major stuff, like new shaders being supported, and being able to toggle FSAA and AF in case of the ATI drivers on Mac OS).
Don't get me wrong, it's handy for some people to have optimised settings for the ATI drivers I'm sure and if people don't notice the quality it's dropping to give them a 5-10 fps boost then who I am I to point out they are waisting their time, but I think the guy has not gone out of his way to set the record straight and has probably done not badly out of what little work he does. Of course, he could have just released it as a small utility of a few hundred K to turn the appropriate flags on and off and expose some additional options via drop down lists/checkboxes, but that wouldn't seem nearly as clever I'm sure.
From the Omega Drivers web site:
Important note:
I'm not God, so don't be calling me like that or pretend that I'm one
Indeed.
I own and highly recommend the Compal HEL80 This notebook is awesome! You can get it with a matte (not glossy) WSXGA+ (1680x1050) screen. Power behind it is nVIDIA GeForce Go 7600, and you can get Intel Core 2 Duo now. It's a whitebook which means you buy it from a notebook reseller, not from Circus City or Worst Buy. My favorite and most highly recommended reseller would be PowerNotebooks; if you order from them be sure to order by phone for a nice discount. ProPortable is also a good place to buy from.
It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.
Need more be said?
I have a 2Ghz MacBook Pro with 256MB ATI X1600 and 2GB of RAM. It is my swiss-army knife laptop. It does everything and it does it all very very well. The screen is nice (non-reflective version) and bright with good resolution. The core duo performs very well and with parallels I can run concurrent sessions of Windows XP and Fedora 5 on top of OS X. With Boot Camp I can reboot and play Call of Duty 2 at pretty high settings and Doom 3 and Far Cry play very well indeed.
I'll also second the vote for the build quality. I bought a first gen iBook G4 933Mhz and I still use it regularly despite the MBP because it is robust, smaller and the battery life is very good. The heat issues with the MBP are blown out of all proportion, every laptop I have ever had would run very very hot when playing games and you wouldn't want to play games on your lap anyway. I've measured the temps and the MBP gets no hotter when working hard than the iBook G4 did but you don't hear lots of complaints about the iBook because of its plastic case. Yes, aluminium is going to conduct the heat more rapidly but internally the thing gets no hotter than any other laptop and for something that is high performance I am happy to know that the heat I am feeling is not staying inside an insulated box.
These days the MBP is getting to quite a sensible price and the value of having a real graphics card, not to mention the nice backlit keyboard and all the other useful built in features means that the MacBook Pro is definitely the best value machine around in my book and that doesn't even include the ability to run OS X which is the killer for me. If it can't run OS X it isn't worth buying. No, I don't consider hacking OS X to run on a Sony Vaio as an option.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Related question: are there any LCDs that handle more than one resolution? I would like to replace a dying CRT with an LCD for space and eyestrain reasons, but I have (1) family members who prefer/require different resoluions (2) more importantly - some legacy games that require 800x600. Is there any LCD that looks right in at least two resolutions (native and 800x600)?
Thanks.
sPh
I confess to being not intimately familiar with Apple's notebook pricing on a day to day basis, but what I do know is that these prices have not moved a cent downwards since product launch.
I'd be quite happy to be corrected, but therein lies the rub - the initial models are 8 months old, but they still want the same price for them??
The specification has changed since the MBP was released. Originally, it announced with 1.67 or 1.83Ghz processors. When it was actually released, Apple upgraded the spec to 1.83 and 2.0Ghz for free with the option of a 2.16Ghz Core Duo for extra money. Then they upgraded the base model to 2.0Ghz and the top model got the 2.16Ghz processor as standard which is the current position. In addition, they have added the option of the glossy screen for no charge. My 2Ghz model cost me £1699 in April but today you can buy a 2Ghz machine for £1399. OK, my machine came with 1GB of RAM and a 256MB video card and the base 2Ghz model only comes with 512MB RAM and a 128MB video card but other than that it is identical. RAM is cheap (not from Apple though) so the base model can be bumped up to 1.5GB for an extra £100 or so from Crucial. Really, I have been impressed with Apple gear since I switched three years back. The machines are well built and perform nicely. You cannot compare a Mac versus a PC without taking OS X into account. OS X outperforms Windows in every way (security, stability, ease of use, power, looks) so that alone puts a Mac in a different league. With Parallels I can run Windows in a window or full screen, along with any other x86 OS, and the performance is more than acceptable (I have Boot Camp installed but have stopped using it) so I have access to a far larger software library now than a PC.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
see subject
This may not be the most attractive option, but worth mentioning. There's a company out there called ScreenTek that will change your LCD from matte to high-gloss for $100. The "re-polarizing" process involves removing the old surface, and then installing a new one. They figure most people want high-gloss, but if you have it and want matte instead, they can use the same process and tools to change it out for you.
So if you do find a laptop you like for $1800 in glossy and for $2000 in matte, then I'd get the glossy one and have this outfit change it out for you, and you'll come out ahead.
This page only mentions going from matte to glossy, but they'll gladly do the reverse for you.
Again, it might not be the easiest option, but it is an option that's out there.
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
You must always use a condom as it is safe. you will never get aids remember
http://portableone.com/ Check out their MX series and add the $399 option for the transreflective display. While pricey, its a great display and should give you what you need. Only down side is that the resolution is a bit low.
LCDs suck get a CRT for gaming. They are pretty bad at fast motion video too. I have yet to see one I don't dislike. My 34" Sony XS955 Super Fine Pitch HDTV CRT will be along soon, shipping 200#s from NY to Vancouver BC may seem crazy but I am very pleased. The local Sony store boss has one at home, won't trade for anything in his store.
;).
... Standards and Practices !
Hmm 1400 lines vertical, I wonder what res it will go to
PenGun
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