Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Gaming Laptops on a Budget

The budget for a new laptop will determine what the new acquisition will be equipped with. A good gaming laptop will carry high-end hardware components and provide a superior playing experience in games.

Modern games tend to look more and more like reality. This is done via impressive designs and physics knowledge. If you want to play games at these levels, you'll need a laptop with a good configuration which can handle such tasks.

If the budget is your primary concern, you'll be glad to know that even cheap gaming laptop can run most modern games without major glitches. They cannot run them perfectly, at the maximum settings, but for people who only need to play the latest games without the need to experience them in full definition or 3D, then a cheap gaming laptop should handle the job pretty well.

What it always boils down to when looking for these kinds of laptops is the hardware. Without good hardware, chances are you won't be running any application which demands a bit more from your computer.

Modern games demand you have a good processor installed. You should aim for at least a dual core, if the budget won't allow for a quad. Also, be careful what type of processor is installed. You should aim for laptops which carry Intel processors in the Sandy Bridge series (Core i3, i5 or i7) or if you've got deep pockets, the newer Ivy Bridge processors line work even better and consume less power.

The amount of RAM for a good gaming laptop should start at 4GB. If you require more, make sure the laptop allows you for future upgrades. A powerful gaming laptop will carry somewhere in the 8-16GB RAM range.

The graphics card is probably the most important hardware component in any gaming system. Since the appearance of the newer Ivy Bridge processors with integrated graphics, a laptop which carries such a processor without any dedicated graphics cards will make a decent gaming laptop for people who don't ask for much in terms of quality. You won't crank up the detail settings to ultra on an integrated GPU system, but with an Ivy Bridge configuration, most games will run in low to medium quality settings at decent frames per second.

But you shouldn't stop at an integrated graphics card if you have the chance to get something with a bit more punch. If you find a laptop which carries a dedicated graphics card, go for something with at least the Nvidia 600 series GPU installed or the ATI 7000 series GPU. These are newer graphics cards models which will play most games with details set at medium to high.

Extreme laptop models will even carry two graphics cards in SLI configuration, but they will burn a pretty big hole in your pocket, plus their battery won't last for that long, making them less portable than other laptops.

If you're on a tight budget, get something with a dual core processor, 4GB of system memory and a graphics card of at least 1GB of dedicated VRAM memory.

If the budget is flexible, then you might want to look for systems with quad core processors, 8-16 GB of system memory and a newer graphics card model.

I keep track of the current laptops that are designed with gaming in mind at the Best Laptops For Gamers page.

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