Gaming Laptops

Finding the best gaming laptop for you

When you are in the market for a gaming laptop, most experts agree that you should concentrate on three features: graphics, RAM, and system speed. There are many laptops on the market, each offering a unique set of features, but if you ensure that your laptop has the right configuration of these three features, you will be able to play and enjoy the newest and hottest games on the market right now.

Gaming Laptop

Graphics:

The quality of your graphics card or chipset controls the video quality of your display. Obviously, you’ll want to have a decent monitor, but without a top-of-the-line graphics card, you won’t be able to get the full benefit of today’s high-speed 3-D games. NVIDIA GeForce or the Ati Mobility line are both well-known for being high-end gaming graphics cards. Generally speaking, you’ll want to stay away from most “integrated graphics” laptops, as they are harder to upgrade and generally provide a less satisfactory experience.

RAM:

RAM, also known as random-access memory, is the power behind your graphics. Standard SDRAM can usually get you speeds of around 150 MHz (megahertz, the measure of computer component speed). That’s great for a lot of games, but the newest games use 3-D imaging and need a lot more speed to look and run right. DDR 2 SDRAM is generally considered the “must-have” RAM, since it can boost your graphics speed to 200 MHz or more. The more RAM you have, the more things your laptop can do at once; the best gaming machines now come with at least 2 GB of RAM, enough to keep up with today’s high-speed graphics. It’s also possible to get dedicated video RAM, or VRAM. While this does provide high speed and crisp graphics, it’s usually not the most cost effective choice.

Speed:

As you’ve probably picked up by now, the speed of your laptop is dependent on how much and what kind of RAM you have and what kind of video card you have. But perhaps most important is what kind of central processor your laptop has; a slow processor can cause your games to stall in the middle, or worse yet, not run correctly at all. The speed of your hard drive is an important factor as well. A good rule of thumb is to buy the fastest processor you can afford. Your CPU is the heart of your laptop, and will determine the speed at which every other part of your system runs.

If you keep these three basic principles in mind, you should be able to select the right laptop for your gaming needs.