Best gaming Laptop

[Bill]

I think he (topic starter) really should consider swapping his LCD screens.

If I knew him personally I would offer to do it myself, it can't be that difficult.

He has a WUXGA in his old laptop.

[Garandhero]

I dont know im hearing good things about the 1680x1050 WSXGA+... I think ill be happy with it.

[Guest Spudscooking]

Ok I don't know what you were on when you thought you were playing Crysis on High with a single 8700m, but even two 8700m GTs can barely run the game with a playable frame rate on Medium settings. Dual 7950 GTXs can only run this game Medium with about 35 Avg. FPS and one 7950 out performs two 8700s. The 8700s are worthless! The 8800m is the only single mobile card that can run this on mostly Medium and some High Settings with a decent frame rate. I am no crysis fanboy. I hate the game, but these are facts. I would go with the m15x by the way. It will be cheaper than the D910C, and smaller. It is rumored to have 4-5 Hours of Battery life, but I tend to doubt that. I also disagree with Bill completely about Alienware. There are no problems with SLI with the m9750 and m9700. They have fixed the problems and their customer support is great! The m15x doesn't offer SLI anyway so you won't have that issue. The 8800m currently has issues supporting SLI and that goes with all laptops not just alienware. Thats why Sager delayed their 17" and alienware is not announcing their m17x. You can also download any driver you want. I don't know where the whole stock driver thing came from. I have a m9750 and I am using the 169.28 Drivers from this website. There are no heating issues with these laptops and alienware learned this lesson from the m5500s and m7700s that would give people 3rd degree burns.(Sarcastic) The m9750 is literally silent and I am sure the m15x will be. The m9750 is also the thinnest SLI notebook ever made. The D910C is pretty big and no matter what configuration it will be heavy. The graphics card probably only weighs .5lbs so minus that off the total weight and there it is. The Sager 5972 was a great deal, but it will be beasted by alienware. People will not accept that alienware has become competitive in its prices. They no longer overcharge that much, if any, on their laptops. If your computer stops working they will send you a new one. Its easy. They are also based in the US so if your from the states they are "local". Correct me if I am wrong, but Sager is in Europe I think. The point made about getting 3 Hard Drives though makes perfect sense. I understand that it doesn't sound that way, but what makes it is raid. Raid makes all of your hard drives work as one drive. Since they work like one the RPM works like one and if they are all the same size and speed then it multiplies the RPM by the number of hard drives. So you get 3x faster loading. Please don't hurt yourself by getting anything, but the m15x right now.

I don't know what res you are considering standard, but I assume you are talking about 1600x1200?!

My laptop (7950gtx- C2D t7600- 2GB RAM) runs Crysis with high shaders and the DX10 'only' effects (POM, Sunshafts etc.) at ~24 fps.

Yeah, at 1024x800. Is that bad? I don't think so, my native res is 1900x1200, but 1024x800 looks sharp enough to me, I just cannot stand anything less.

[Grey728]

I mentioned Alienware and SLI problems because this guy sold off his laptop, bought a desktop, and basically left the forums because of his SLI problems.

He was even getting close to having moderator powers too because of his help with SLI topics. (Edit: He is still a partial mod)

While we had some disagreements (me believing the SLI problem isn't as bad as he made it out to be) he still must have had some serious trouble to actually get rid of his laptop.

So, just a fair warning to you guys.

I've also not liked Alienware and their driver support, having to have customer type codes to get drivers, ect.

Reputable manufacturers have driver downloads open to everybody. If Alienware doesn't do this anymore I would like to know about it.

Yeah, I've somewhat been arguing back and forth between him and another member of the forums in regards to SLi. Had he waited 1 more month and tried again (November 2007) I think he would have been successful installing drivers for SLi. Now the argument has morphed from not being able to install drivers but how long SLi will be supported to if SLi is even a good technology and not some 'fad'.

Anyways, while I've heard awful things about Alienware's customer service, they don't block their drivers and you don't need to have some customer code for that anymore. It's freely available to all. The only thing you really need a customer code is to view the locked Alienware forums which is virtually useless. What IS good about the forum though is that Alienware techs do actively look at it and they'll even send you parts to your home without the need to call them or request them. An example would be a customer having heat issues, they'll send out a new heatsink without the customer requesting it really.

[Bill]

I don't think its a "fad".

I think multi-GPU rendering is the future, weather through SLI or multi-GPUs on one card that is the way we are heading.

Soon Nvidia will be pumping out multi GPU cards like intel pumps outs quad core CPUs.

We will have to see 3 years from now what we end up getting though.

[Grey728]

Oh, one more thing about Alienware: "On-site warranty repair" REALLY means having a tech on the phone while you do everything they tell you to do and you're holding all the tools. If you're not comfortable with working on computer hardware in general, you might as well just send it in.

The whole "Award winning customer service" is a lie; marketing jargon at best. I guess it's "Award winning" if you're standards are really low.

[Guyver1]

its weird being talked about in the 3rd person :)

my only comment on gaming + laptops is this.

If your a very serious gamer, a gamer who likes to play your games on the maximum quality settings to get the most enjoyment and immersion and play games they were meant to be played then there is only one option:

A Desktop

plain and simple.

If your not that bothered about dropping detail in games to get a playable framerate or dropping the resolution and gaming is more of a pasttime when your bored and got nothing else to do and you have space/mobility issues then by all means research laptops and take all the advice you can get.

Oh and if you have problems with your laptop dont think you cant send it back and get a full refund after a period of time.

I got a full cancellation of my credit agreement after 5 months and was refunded my deposit due to my issues.

Personally i would avoid SLI on laptops for the foreseeable future

Also

think about this:

my m9750 SLI laptop cost £2336

the rig in my sig cost £2200

on my rig i can play Crysis maxed out at 1680x1050 with an avg framerate of 45, maxing out around 80ish and never going lower than about 25. And thats using the Very High workaround for XP (in the Crysis config files copy all the [4] settings into all the [3] settings. that way you get Very High settings in XP)