Topic: Gaming Laptop Recommendations

From what I understand Alienware didn't become crap until Dell bought them.

Other than the tacky design what does a gaming Laptop have that other's don't. The specs on that thing look run of the mill.

I tend to find that Dells have the best motherboards for gaming, personally, I have a Dell Studio 15 that I custom ordered with i7 processor (no idea what series, whatever the top of the market was in August 2010), and a nice ATI Radeon graphics card, I personally would have prefered Nvidia, but that wasn't available on the model I got, I tend to find that intel processors and nvidia cards work best together, and AMD processors and ATI cards work best together, those two pairs are what you should probably shoot for. I also HIGHLY recommend, that whatever you do get, you get a good protection plan covering EVERYTHING, including accidental damage, so far on my laptop I've already had to replace the DVD drive (stopped working), top half of the outer shell (cracked itself from transporting it everywhere with me), and the fan (also stopped working), those would have cost a fortune to replace, but I got the protection plan for around 100 USD or so at the time, I know Dell offers their protection plans dirt cheap when you first buy your computer, after that, the price goes way up. Hope this helps

I've been a user of gaming laptops for a number of years. My two most recent laptops have been Clevo machines (they don't sell to the public) branded as Rock and Sager machines. I've been happy with both, but they have been expensive as they are high end.

If you want to run cutting edge new games that need a decent machine, avoid laptops as a general rule unless you are willing to really throw some cash at one. The main reason I'd say this is that no matter what the specs of a latop, it won't perform anywhere near as well as a desktop with "similar" specs (ie a GeForce 400M (mobile) is nowhere near as good as a desktop 400), also similar is the case with the processors (hence why my laptop has a desktop processor in it and lasts about 15 mins on the battery).

On top of that, most laptops have really slow hard drives in them which really affect the performance of the machine. You can get faster drives which consume more power and get a lot hotter or you can go for SSDs. Either way it all starts to cost a lot more to get the quality components.

The two laptops I found have pretty darn good specs. There's no need to be skeptical on laptop performance, in my opinion. Here, I'll list some of the specs, but I'm only covering the main bases.

DELL Inspiron Q15R Switch 15.6"

Intel Core i7-2630QM, Windows 7 Home Premium, 6MB cache memory, 6GB DDR3 RAM, Intel HD Graphics 3000 graphics card (1.7GB shared mem.) and 640GB 500 SATA hard drive.

ACER Aspire 5755G 15.6"

Intel Core i5-2430M (running at 2.4GHz, able to Turbo-Boost to 3.0GHz), Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, 8GB DDR3 RAM, Intel HD 3000 graphics card and 1TB hard drive.

If you ask me, these are pretty good for most media use, especially gaming.

Gaming? Processor only does so much for games and an Intel 3000 is not something you want to rely on for games. Not sure if it will even run Skyrim, and Intel's driver support is, in short, terrible.

@Ravage - No, an Intel HD 3000 can run Skyrim. I checked. Processor speed does come in quite a bit when it comes to games though, which is why I want to be careful. Compared with everything else there, I'd say it's a good 'nuff choice. I'm not sure about driver support for Intel, but from what I've used from my older PCs, I've never had a problem so far. I'd say I'm good with it.

Unless you can suggest something better, maybe?

I can't recommend a laptop for gaming as I have never seen one that hasn't had some fairly major problem that is un-fixable by the user. But if you have to have a laptop, and don't wish to just get a cheaper laptop and get a desktop for home use/gaming, then you will want something with an integrated graphics chip from AMD or Nvidia. The recent ones paired with Intel's chips have a decent system that works with the Intel graphics that come on-board (as has already been mentioned by someone here). Asus has a recent laptop model (which is obviously targeted at gamers) which is probably one of the better gaming "laptops". However, the thing is huge. But it is necessary to get that kind of equipment into a laptop without overheating easily like most others do.

I would strongly consider not worrying about a powerful "gaming" laptop and get a desktop for gaming at a later date when you have the money to do so. In a couple years you will not be able to play the games you want and have to pay for a completely new laptop, which is fine if you have the disposable income, but you probably don't if you're a student.

If you want a good laptop for gaming, look in your price range for something you think will do and try looking up comparative benchmarks on tech sites for the included on-board chipset. It isn't usually easy because mobile chipsets are not benchmarked often. Anandtech is a really good site which allows you to compare two specific products with a variety of benchmarks.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Mobile/137

@ImDiggerDan I'm jealous...big time!