Good lord, Rimbo, you must be off your meds. I’m not about to get a Mac for a gaming lap top! And I’m certainly not going to attend boot camp just to learn how to run PC software on a Mac.
Okay, so I was about to pull the trigger on that sexy little Asus A8Jm that BaconTastesGood mentioned – only $1400 from Newegg! – but now I can’t figure out how to buy extra batteries for it. I need at least one, and maybe two. How on earth does a guy figure out what batteries a laptop takes? And should I be getting a little laptop mouse, or do touchpads work okay?
Although the 7600 is a fantastic little video card, one of my favorites of the current gen, bear in mind the 7900 will double its framerates. It may not matter at 15" LCD resolutions, however.
The video card is technically removable and upgradable in these models (I own the Asus W3J which is almost identical), but I am not sure exactly how you’d do it. Lack of video card upgrades is still the achilles heel of laptops.
It’s a damn shame, because a simple video card upgrade does miracles these days; you can slap an AGP X1900XTX (yep, they make 'em) in an aging Pentium 4 3.2 GHz and it’s magically transformed into a kick ass gaming rig.
Get a full size mouse, those little laptop mice suck even more than the touchpad: You’ll destroy your fingers on top of still not being able to get your pointer where you want it.
Are batteries relatively easy to find retail? Your link shows them backordered, and it doesn’t look like Newegg has them. I’ve found a few places online that seem to have them in stock, but no place I’ve heard of. Can’t I just waltz into, say, a CompUSA or Fry’s and pick a couple of these up?
I feel your pain Jeff. I have a gen 1 XPS as well. It plays everything fine, even NWN2, but man it is heavy and hot and noisy. The fans kick in and it sounds ready for liftoff. I am due for a new machine next year and my plan is either Dell again but Inspiron not XPS or the intel mac pro with boot camp for gaming.
Batteries are almost impossible to find retail since they’re not standardized. You’ll have to mail order spares from an Asus dealer or someone that makes compatible ones – this is pretty much going to be a requirement of any battery you want (Lenovo, HP, Sony, etc.).
I’ll probably go for a top end XPS again with the 7950 in a couple/three months (unless a new card is out by then.) The reviews of the M1710 say that it is much better at staying cool. By the way, be sure and remove the fans and clean out the dust on a regular basis - makes a huge difference in how much those loud fans run.
So I just ordered that Asus A8Jm from NewEgg. 14" is cool by me and the price was right. Plus, hearing you guys talk about ginormous screaming fan-powered machines crushing and burning your laps has spooked me.
That sucks about batteries. I looked all over for the model number wumpus gave me, but most places had them on back order. I need them in the next week, so I called NewEgg and the guy I spoke to was alarmingly clueless: “Uh, yeah, I’m not really sure, but I think any battery will work if it has, like, the right number of cells”.
I finally found them for a silly low price at this place, FrugalGear, but I couldn’t get through to anyone to find out if they actually have them in stock. So I stupidly ordered two, just in case. I have a bad feeling about this.
That’s a good deal on a good laptop. I have one very similar. It is huge but it can handle CivIV easily, heck I even get good performance out of Gothic III.
That was mainly an issue with older, Pentium 4 laptops, not with Pentium M or Core Duo ones. They all run pretty cool.
That ASUS looks pretty close to my ideal notebook, at 5+ pounds (that’s probably without a battery, though) and decent video. I’d consider bumping it up to 2GB of RAM, though.
I’m still very happy with my Inspiron 1705. It’s a huge badboy but it can do pretty much anything that I want reasonably well. Overclocking the GPU to a 7900 GSX gave it a nice boost.
The a8js is the newer revision. For an extra $200 you get:
Higher resolution screen (1440x900 vs 1280x800)
2.0Ghz core2duo merom CPU (vs the 1.83Ghz core1duo)
Faster videocard in the 7700go, roughly 15-20% faster. It has 50% more pixel shaders (12, vs 8) and is built on a smaller process so it takes less power too. It’s just about as fast as a real desktop 7600GT.
It’s not a slam dunk, but if it were me I’d probably blow the extra $200. Actually if it were me I’d wait a month for vista and then see what’s what.