Gaming laptops

Gaming laptops have been designed just for that: playing the lastest games at high quality with good performance. To this end they use powerful processors and graphics cards, and have to be quite big (15" at least, 17-18" the most powerful ones). They usually have high resolution screens and, sometimes, good speakers with subwoofer, and can often be configured with fast hard drives (7,200 rpm, sometimes in RAID 0, or SSDs). They usually have a good build quality and an aggressive design, but a short battery life (1-2 h).

True gaming laptops are expensive (usually from 1,200 USD, but extreme gaming laptops can go over 3,000 USD). If you want a laptop mainly for playing games for cheap, have a look to these cheap gaming laptops.

Configurations: when picking the actual model or customizing one, it's good to keep a few things in mind:

• Graphics card: the one found most often in gaming laptops is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 260M, but if you need more performance you can look for the GTX 280M or for a dual solution (2 cards in SLI configuration); but you have to keep in mind that GTX laptop graphics cards are quite slower than desktop ones, because they are based on the older core found in the 9800 series. In ATI's side, the Mobility Radeon HD 4850 is a good option, but harder to find, and the 4870 with GDDR5 memory seems to be troublesome for the manufacturers and I have not found a single laptop using it; of course ATI also offers dual configurations (2 graphics cards in CrossFireX). Just below these "true gaming cards" you have the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4830 and then the Nvidia GeForce GTS (GTS 260M, 250M and 160M) and that are also good performers. ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series and Nvidia GeForce 300M series are around the corner.
• Processor: when playing games at high detail levels the usual bottleneck is the graphics card, but the more powerful the graphics card, the more powerful needs to be the processor not to become the bottleneck. In addition, some games are very processor-dependent, specially RTS ones. Currently some games are optimized for more than 2 cores, while many others are not, so for some games quad-core processors are the best option, but for others a fast dual-core processor will give better performance. Mobile Intel Core i7 processors seem to be a good option for gaming, because they auto-overclock themselves when multicore usage is low.
• Screen: you can find gaming laptops either with low resolution screens (for exemple 1366x768 in 15.6" size), or with high resolution (up to 1920x1200 in 17" or 1920x1080 in several sizes). High resolutions in small screens can make text, icons and toolbars too small. In addition, the higher resolution of the screen, the more powerful need to be the graphics card to run games at the screen's native resolution.
• Cooling: gaming laptops generate a lot of heat and need a good cooling system. They usually have it, but anyway a cooling base is a good investment to help keep temperatures low. One of the best is the NZXT Cryo LX.
• Mobility: gaming laptops are heavier than regular laptops of the same size and have short-lived batteries, so they are not really very portable. And keep in mind that a gaming desktop computer is going to deliver more performance for your money. Have a look to the Alienware desktops to compare prices.

Core i7 laptops