The Best Gaming Laptop
So you want the best gaming laptop?
I guess everyone has different ideas about what may be the best solution, but the decision is going to be unique for you, and basically for me it boils down to five key points:
Price: This is an obvious factor. You may want to budget for a laptop or notebook for under $1000. Or be prepared to pay more than $2k. If you’re paying with cash, you could get the price beaten down, or some games thrown in for free – it never hurts to ask.
Be very cautious of getting into a hire-purchase or rent-to-own agreement. Know exactly what the total price you will be paying is. The interest in a $1000 laptop over three years at 20% is almost half the price of the laptop alone! And check the add-on costs, like insurance and booking fees. What seemed like the best price laptop, may very well be a very expensive one if you don’t pay cash.
Screen Size: 17 inch is the absolute minimum standard these day, and 21inch+ will most likely be the norm soon. However, you may be looking at using an external monitor or TV screen, so this may not be so much of an issue.
Brand: I’m not so hung up on the brand – as long as I’ve heard of it/ I know that the likes of Asus, HP/Compaq and IBM are all reputable brands. I would be very careful, however, about selecting a brand I had never heard of. They may be quite a bit cheaper, but most likely use cheap components that aren’t going to go the mile anyway.
Dedicated Graphics Card: 512MB should be the absolute minimum you look for in gaming laptop computers – not a shared graphics card. Most new games rely intensively on a grunty graphics card – there is nothing worse than buying a new game only to find that your graphics card can’t even support it at the lowest specs.
Processor: The processor is probably the most important component in your laptop. It’s basically the engine room, and personally, I would aim for a processor that is currently near the cream of the top – you can usually upgrade RAM in a laptop, but it is normally too expensive to do for a laptop. If your budget allows, go for the best you can get.
SO those are they key points for buying a laptop for gaming as I see it. However, there are other things tonote consider too, but they aren’t as important.
Hard-drive: Also referred to as the HDD. Most entry-level laptops start with around 160 gigabytes – that’s more than enough for gaming.
Sound-card: You may want a dedicated sound-card, but I haven’t found a great deal of difference with or without them. It really depends if you use external speakers, headphones or the speakers on your laptop.
Warranty/After-Sales Support: If something does go wrong, you want it fixed, and fast. These goes back a bit to the brand thing. Although you may have to pay a bit more for the brand-name laptop, you can normally expect that there will be decent after-sales support and service if something does go wrong.