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Issue Date: December 16, 2007
You can play games and travel
Consoles and desktops aren't the only way to go
Gamers will tell you there's nothing like a keyboard, monitor and mouse to get the adrenaline flowing. But what happens when you need to hit the road to attend a business conference or you just want get out of the house? Enter the PC gaming laptop.
These heavy-duty laptops will not work well on an airplane tray table, but they do pack quite a powerful set of features. Most of them use CPU chips and high-end graphics cards, which means you'll get next-gen gaming out of a fairly compact package.
All of these laptops offer the typical capabilities of a PC, such as word processing and access to e-mail. They weigh in the 10- to 20-pound range, and most of them have relatively large keyboards, so there's nothing to cramp your gaming style.
For core gamers, the undisputed champion is Alienware. Its latest, the Area-51 m9750 (prices start at $1,699, alienware.com), in Batman black, has a 17-inch display and two graphics cards for faster video. The two cards work in tandem to draw the two halves of the screen, adding detail and depth to game scenes. This laptop also has two hard drives (for a total of 640 gigabytes), so there's plenty of space to save advancement through a game without having to skimp on other media, such as music and photo files.
Fans of high-tech design will like the Dell XPS M2010 (starting at $2,499, dell.com), which has a 20-inch screen that folds up and out on two metal legs. It has a detachable keyboard and comes with 7.1-channel surround sound. Known in computer parlance as a "desktop replacement," the M2010 is still portable enough to lug to a cyber cafe.
Folks who like to temper their gaming with passive entertainment should take a look at HP's Pavilion HDX Entertainment Notebook, also known as the HP Dragon (hp.com). This firebreathing -- OK, not really -- laptop, which costs $2,699, can game with the best of them. Folks who want HD video playback will enjoy its HD DVD reader for high-resolution movies, and a remote control for skipping through the video and audio.
-- By John Biggs |
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