Cheap gaming capable laptop

[darthus]

Hey guys,

Ok, I used to be looking at gaming DTRs. Then I realized I should just concentrate on my desktop for most of my gaming, and paying mid 2000's for a gaming laptop didn't make much sense. Not to mention they were bulky, heavy, and had terrible battery life.

Then I started looking at lighter and more power effecient. But still, if I wanted something respectable gaming, that was thinish and had good batt life, I was left with like the Dell 9200, which when given decent ram and a good processor was still around 2000 bucks, and won't even ship until December.

So now, I'm starting to get a bit more realistic. =) I'm realizing that I will use my desktop primarily for my gaming, but I'd still like to have my laptop be gaming capable, meaning it can play World of Warcraft capably in my roommate's room or the living room, and maybe some FPS's without chugging horribly. But reasonably light and good battery life are still somewhat important.

So I'm assuming I'd need something like this:

128 (maybe 64) meg devoted video card. Radeon 9600 or 9700 would be nice.
Maybe a lower scale Pentium M, like 1.6 or so, whatever I need to play games decently.
At least 512 megs ram, though with my experience Windows XP can chug if you don't have 768-1 gig ram.
Lightish, 8 pounds or under.
Thin if possible.
Battery life... 3 and half hours or more.
15.4 inch screen or better would be nice.

And yet I'd like it to be in the 1000-1500 dollar range.

Looking at the refurbished dells, there are some 8600's and 9100's that might fall in this range. Though I dunno if a PM 1500 could run games decently for the 8600, or if a p4-3000 would be too heavy and have horrible battery life for the 9100.

8600

9100

Does anyone have any suggestions, or am I being totally unrealistic?

 

[imported_haris]

The 8600 and 9100 might not be the best gaming laptop for your money. Even though it has the mobility 9700 the screen size means that you'll be losing any performance inprovement over say a 9600 or you'll be playing games at a non native resolution.

You might want to think about the new Gateway 7405GX laptop. It's about 8lbs and has the following specs: AMD64 3200+, 512MB, 80GB DVD burner, and 64MB Mobility 9600. I play all of my games in widescreen mode (on an older eMachine m6805) and I love it. Currently selling on Best Buy for $1400 but it should have either a $100-150 rebate during sale periods.

Also if you can wait a bit, there are rumors that there will be more models available soon. I can't remember how long, but I think people were expecting new models for the holidays probably starting around Black Friday.

 

[darthus]

Thanks for the reply. So I've researched a little, and gaming in the non-native resolution for the monitor makes it look worse? But you mention that you game in widescreen. Does that mean I should be looking for laptops with a lower native resolution, like just an WXGA instead of the WUXGA or whatever? Basically from what I've read, the high resolution widescreen monitors look great on the desktop, where you can set the resolution high, but bad when you had to turn the resolution down for games.

Is this about right? And doesn't Dell have lower resolution widescreen options that would help with this?

 

[imported_haris]

You are correct, the larger the resolution the better it looks but non native resolutions distort images. You might also want to keep in mind that not all LCDs are as bad as others at switching to lower resolutions. It's best to try the monitor out to see how it behaves, which could be a problem with mail order companies like Dell.

Dell does offer WXGA as a standard option on the 15 inch laptops. I would have be tempted to get a larger resolution screen if I could have spent the big bucks for the mobility 9800.

 

[fbrdphreak]

eMachines/Gateway is your best bet for a decent gaming machine at a decent price, hands down.

 

[darthus]

Thanks guys. I checked out the Gateway 7405 GX. Looks like a good machine. The thing I dunno about though, is that for the same price, 1300 bucks, you can get a similarly outfitted Dell 8600, but with the 128 Radeon 9700 instead of a 64MB mobility 9600. Wouldn't a 64 meg vid card kind of hurt it in playing some of the newer games?

I am intrigued by the Mobile Athlon though, that's the first laptop I've seen with one. I wonder how it compares to the Pentium Ms. It also comes with an 80 gig drive by default which is nice.

 

[zodder]

I've been playing WoW stress test on my 8600 (1.6, 784MB, 128MB 9600 Pro) at 1680x1050 and it's gorgeous! Thsi lappie has NO problems running this game maxed out.

 

[imported_haris]

The Gateway is $1300 plus Best buy has rebates on it ($150). I think they run every two weeks or so. The AMD64 should be a faster process, but the M gets better battery life. The 64MB video memory isn't horrible if you're not a die hard gamer. People are playing Doom3 and CS:S on them right now. There are going to be plenty of games made in the next couple of years that will be using those same engines.

 

[gtd2000]

I have the Emachines M6810 with the Radeon 9600 - it plays most games very well indeed.

If you are used to playing FPS games at high frame rates on a desktop machine I'd check out the performance of games like Far Cry and Doom 3 first on those systems and see if you think that there is enough horsepower.

For me - the M6810 is not fast enough to play Far Cry or Doom 3 at good frame rates - if you think gaming at 30fps is fast enough then yes it will keep you happy.
I consider 70fps to be about right for FPS gaming and anything less is just jerky and sluggish.

You can play the above games as lower settings perfectly well but whats the point of playing the latest games when you don't get the benefit? You need serious horsepower to play either of these games smoothly.

For me the rendering of games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein is already good enough - if only they made versions of Far Cry and Doom 3 at this level I'd be happy!

I'd still recommend an Emachines (or Gateway - same laptop) for your purpose.

 

[ActuaryTm]

The eMachines M68xx line (as mentioned) in an excellent choice on a budget.

A few other choices, from recent ATHD threads:

• Acer 1681WLMi
• Acer Aspire 2012WLMi

 

[darthus]

Thanks for the suggestions guys. Those look like really nice lappys at a reasonable price. Is the Dell Inspiron 8600 the only affordable Pentium M or Mobile Athlon lappy that has a 128 meg Radeon 9600 or better?

I saw one of those acers had a 64 meg Radeon 9700. From my experience with video cards, for gaming the difference between 64 meg and 128 is a world of difference. As you noted above, Doom 3 and Far Cry can't really be played nicely on a 64 meg 9600, but the person with the 8600 with the 128 meg Radeon 9600 can play Doom 3 pretty well. Now mostly I'd be playing FPS's on my desktop sure, but it'd be nice to be able to play things like Morrowind and future graphically intensive RPG's and MMOs on it.

I've actually been looking at Ebay, and I've seen multiple 1.5 ghz 8600's with 512 meg ram and 128 meg radeon 9600's go for around 950 bucks, because of the aftermath of dell's 750 dollar off deal.

There was a 1.6 with SXGA I was looking at last night, that unfortunately went for 1200. I'm trying to keep my Ebay expenditure under 1100, because I'm not getting it straight from the source.

 

[ActuaryTm]

Originally posted by: darthus
Thanks for the suggestions guys. Those look like really nice lappys at a reasonable price. Is the Dell Inspiron 8600 the only affordable Pentium M or Mobile Athlon lappy that has a 128 meg Radeon 9600 or better?

There are others. The NP3790 is another choice, and offers a 128MB Radeon 9700. Pricing (depending upon the configuration, of course) seemed a bit out of the range you originally indicated, and thus I left it off the list. If interested, user reviews here, and here.

I saw one of those acers had a 64 meg Radeon 9700. From my experience with video cards, for gaming the difference between 64 meg and 128 is a world of difference. As you noted above, Doom 3 and Far Cry can't really be played nicely on a 64 meg 9600, but the person with the 8600 with the 128 meg Radeon 9600 can play Doom 3 pretty well. Now mostly I'd be playing FPS's on my desktop sure, but it'd be nice to be able to play things like Morrowind and future graphically intensive RPG's and MMOs on it.

Let me preface the rest with the following: am certainly not a gamer, in any sense of the word. However, I do have at the very least a competent understanding of mobile hardware (have had every mobile machine I've owned down to the bare chassis at some point during its operational lifetime). From the information I've read concerning the subject, the M11 (Radeon Mobility 9700) can attain much higher clock rates than the M10 (Radeon Mobility 9600). User reviews concerning playability seem to give the edge to the 64MB 9700 over the 128MB 9600, and even moreso to the 128MB 9700 as you might imagine. Would read through the benchmarks and comparisons between the two GPUs at the site mentioned below. I think you will find most of the gamers prefer the Mobility 9700 in either memory variation (64MB, 128MB, or the 256MB variety) to any of the variants of the Mobility 9600.

Would advise reading some of the reviews and user experiences in a number of threads at this forum. You will find a great deal of information regarding not only the 8600, the 3790, and a number of the Acer models mentioned, but also a host of other machines, including the aforementioned M68xx line from eMachines.

Good luck with your impending purchase.

 

[gtd2000]

ActuaryTm
I was led to believe that there were very few physical differences between the 9600 and 9700?

Granted, the stock clock speed of the 9700 is generally higher but the 9600 can normally be overclocked to 9700 specs with ease. My 9600 based notebook (m6810) is very comfortable around 420/220 and I'm sure I could go higher if necessary.

I was also considering the 9700 route in the early days but the general consensus was that the 9600 coupled with the horsepower of the Athlon 64 would outperform the 9700 & Centrino based solutions.

At the end of the day the "horsepower" was the more important criteria (for me).

 

[Delerious]

You can find a nice 9100 or 8600 for a good price due to the 750 off coupon of recent. Try ebay or craigslist.

 

[cheesehead]

I got a dell for one reason: Accidental Damage Protection. It may not be the fastest laptop on the planet, but if I spill green tea on it during a LANparty, I can get it fixed for free. I'm adding a gig of Pc3200soon, too, so the performance might go up a bit from my paltry 256mb of DDR333. It runs XIII and Warcraft nicely enough, and the LCD works spiffy in XGA or SVGA resolution. I'm going to wipe the HDD pretty soon(maybe later today) and reinstall WinXp Pro, which might help it run a shade faster (seeing as to how all the crapware is cluttering this thing up).

 

[ActuaryTm]

Originally posted by: gtd2000
ActuaryTm
I was led to believe that there were very few physical differences between the 9600 and 9700?

Granted, the stock clock speed of the 9700 is generally higher but the 9600 can normally be overclocked to 9700 specs with ease. My 9600 based notebook (m6810) is very comfortable around 420/220 and I'm sure I could go higher if necessary.

Like the M10, the M11 comes very modestly clocked. In fact, those testing found it much more so the case than with the M10.

Case in point here. Granted, this version of the M11 is the 256MB variety, and chances are other versions may vary slightly. The differences between the M10 and M11? Appears to be roughly 600 to 1,000 marks in 3DMark03. Appears it hit 515/300 without artifacts.

In constrast of my original statement, Adam (owner of PC Torque, who hosts Notebookforums.com) is very much a gamer, and has a great deal of experience and expertise with gaming on mobile machines.

 

[Flashram]

Check out the Gateway m505x. I have one and it's great. 4.5 hours battery life, 6.5 lbs, slot load dvd/cdrw, Radeon 9600, great speakers w/ subwoofer, runs silent and cool. You can pick one up on Ebay ~$1000, possibly less. Great deal. Not my auction, but you can see specs and pics here.