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Tuesday 9 November 2004

Ultimate gaming laptop [Beej]


This clan is no stranger to warm laps, and as I understand we also have a few happy notebook 0wners too (ba-boom tish!). I digress...

If there is an ultimate gamer laptop, and money were not the number one issue, what can you get?

I've been looking around over the last few weeks and have come up with the following ugly-looking sons of beehatches:

Alienware Area-51® Extreme - Mmmmmmmmm! I'll spare any attempt at a review because there are others who can wipe the floor with a more authoritative opinion :) For price, a P4 @ 3.2 + 1GB PC3200 + 128MB Radeon 9700 seems to come out at around $2500 (£1350). Hexus review here.

Voodoo ENVY M:780 - as I understand it, the same innards as the Alienware. Specs up to more or less the same too, except with 256MB on the 9700 and with a 1680x1050 WSXGA+ screen. Somehow though, I seem to have got the spec-o-matic up to $4900 (£2650) without noticing, whoah!

Falcon Northwest Fragbook - appalling named, but a bit of a beast. Black Ops™ aluminium carry case, ooooooooh! Comes in two flavours: "TL" thin and light with 15 inches, and "DR" desktop replacement at 17 inches. A hefty Prescott 3.2 config comes out at $4300 (£2300) which beats the Voodoo but still way right of field!

xVx Monstruo-M - no better named, but at last a lappy with 64bit. This is good right? A full on sensible but up-spec Athy 3700+ (rated 2.4GHz?) with a gig of the good stuff and a Radeon 9700 "Turbo 256MB" comes in at $2200 (£1200), so on a par with the Alienware.

Acer 3200 Ferrari - a bit overstyled for me, and prancing horse means "tiny penis" where I come from, but it has the 9700, and I've used one and it ain't too bad for your top-shelf lappy. $2000 (£1100). There are probably better Acers, but shopping for these things notebooks is a nightmare of numbers and it's almost as bad as surfing the VAIO catalogue... which brings me on to...

Sony VAIO T1 - successor to the TR1MP but designed for looks? Is any VAIO suitable for, say, DOOM3 and teh HL2 futar? I'm guessing no, it's for the clan posers :)

If the trick to buying a DR gaming lappy is getting the best graphics chipset available and a good-sized screen, then that means coming up trumps are the Alienware and the xVx. Battery life - well an issue if you're doing app stuff, and how do you tell? An optional second battery or HD would be a bonus. The Fragbook reads lubberly but that sort of money - even in a "money no object" blog - doesn't seem to be in the realms of normality.

What's the Area-51m like then?

32 comments:


  1. None of these are going to play Doom 3. There's some cutting-edge stuff out now. Notebooks with PCI-Express and Geforce 6800 Go - very very fast indeed. Today happens to be the launch of the Alienware Area-51m 7700 mobile desktop. The last two words are key there. It's 5.6Kg which is the heaviest anyone has ever made one of these things so it's not designed to carry around on the road. It's designed to plonk down and use as a regular desktop but you can pick it up and haul it elsewhere as required. Might be good for you? For that you get a 17-inch WXGA+ or WSXGA+ screen, dual optical drives, dual hard drives (even RAID!) and a PCI-Express Geforce 6800 Go. It's yet to go up on the Alienware EMEA web sites but you can see it over on the US website here.The same chassis is available in a rather uglier form from a no-name brand called MV in the UK, Hexus has a review of it.

    Our of the high-endgaming notebooks, I would say the (old) Area-51m would have about the best battery life because it takes absolutely enormous batteries but with a notebook of such power you only get 1 hour out of one battery and 1:50 or so with two. The old Area-51m is, though, getting a little long in the tooth now.

    Anyway... when making a decision about what you want, first of all you have to decide what importance you place on gaming performance, portability and battery life. It is possible to get a reasonable gaming notebook which either uses Centrino or Athlon 64 and gives you regular battery life while still being fairly portable. It depends if you're happy with 9700. That's not really good enough for Doom 3 and HL2, not by a long stretch. If you want an Alienware, I reckon I could sort something out for you.

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  2. Here's a better link actually about the Area-51m 7700.

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  3. Cheers mate. I wrote this blog offline two days ago, then funnily enough I'm chatting to a chap today and he goes "How good is a GeForce 6800? I just bought a Sega laptop" and I'm, "Sega? This man is a nutcase", and it turns out with a bit of a chin-wag that he's just ordered himself a Sager not a Sega :)

    He has a Sager 9860 coming, which looks well nice! Same sort of spec as what you've pointed out. All these links I've put together are totally irrelevant unless people are eBaying.

    The Area-51m 7700 looks awesome but humongous. The Alienware competitors must have similar ones in the works soon. Will do some more surfing, sigh!

    I must ask - P4 Prescott or Athy 64 system - does it matter?

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  4. That is the same notebook chassis Beej. I think you'll be seeing a lot of it around. Well maybe not the exact chassis since the Sager only appears to have one optical drive but otherwise it looks the same. As for A64 vs P4 - kind of depends. You can't buy an A64 system with a Geforce 6800 Go or PCI-Express right now. So if you want the ultimate in gaming performance in a notebook, P4 is your only option. Later on that'll swing to A64 because Prescott is hilariously power hungry and Intel doesn't actually have an answer, not now - not on the road map, for the FX55 and that gap is going to widen yet further.

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  5. Intel launches Sonoma and Alviso chipsets next quarter which will bring DDR2 memory support and PCI Express support for Centrino based notebooks so expect some actually portable notebooks that can play HL2/Doom3 from next year. Samsung have their M40 which is a 17" notebook which weighs just 3.0kg...pity the graphics are only FX5200GO 64MB....I personally have a VAIO T1 (of course!) and it's a fantastic notebook, but not geared for games (I get 7 hours battery life though!). The VAIO S2 series is actually a nice combination, which has Mob rad 9700 64MB but only weighs 1.8Kg.

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  6. We all know they only good Sony is the TR-series...

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  7. Went through the Dell configurator; the highest spec Inspiron XPS I could muster was a P4 @ 3.4 with a 256MB 9800 on a 15" TFT.

    The Voodoo ENVY M:790 has also turned up (same chassis again) but it's $6000 (gulp!) when I turn on the bells and whistles.

    So I'm thinking Alienware 7700 but this isn't actually going to be available for another 5 weeks, and I could do with a laptop in the next week or so.

    Maybe a fanny girl VAIO to tide me over until then... bleh, too much effort this ;(

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  8. I just got my ALienware 7700 and I love it - It isn't that heavy - and to me - if you are complaining about 12 lbs - you need to go to the gym more often!

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  9. They are pretty darn wonderful. I need to grab a few from work for the next lan party :-)

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  10. I found the beast at Ibuypower.com. With the p4 @ 3.8, 1024MB(512MB X2) DDR2-533 PC4200, Geforce 6800, and twin 60 gb 7200 HD (for the dual raid) it came to $3411.

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  11. I have no idea who those people are but for the sake of $100, I know who I'd rather buy a laptop off out of 'Ibuypower.com' and Alienware...

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  12. Been playing doom 3 on mine - on the highest settings it is so smooth.

    Very nice.

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  13. Just bought an acer 5024wlmi, 1gb RAM, 100gb hdd, Tureon 1.8mhz cpu and an x700 128mb graphics card. Info on game performance comin soon!

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  14. Right. January 2006 now. New Area-51 m5700 just announced. It looks like a possible for my next notebook, although part of me thinks its a bit of a late comer from Alienware given that pretty much everyone else has been doing a decent Sonoma spec for ages.

    The spec is a fair upgrade from my Asus Z71: 256MB 6800go replaces a 128MB 6600go, slight processor bump but essentially still 2GHz P-M, and slightly more compact than what I'm currently wielding. Screen res is a nice 1920x1200 on this 5700 so still 16:10 but more pixels than existing 1680x1050 models like the Asus and Acers.

    So a good spec overall, and a 6800 without having to go overboard with an XPS or crazy P4 7700. 1500 quid then, give or take.

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  15. It is actually quite a nice machine and it's built well too. Another surprise is the fact that you get quite a lot of battery life out of it. It's possible to buy it cheaper badged as a Fujitsu-Siemens but you wont be able to fiddle with the spec much and it definately doesn't look as good.

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  16. Read >2100 times cor. Looking at the stats page, I see that we do a cracking trade off google.com. Hello to you crazy cats in Trinidad & Tobago by the way. Errr can we have an invite to stay?

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  17. Update on the 8th Feb 06. I managed to configur-ate the following

    Alienware Area-51® m5700 - Alienwhore's yummy new-but-overdue Pentium M spec! A 2GHz P-M with 1GB, WUXGA driven by a 6800go, and a 7200rpm 100GB HD comes in at £1665.

    Dell XPS M170 - ah yes, the renamed XPS Gen2, which for £1626 will get you a P-M @ 2.13GHz with a 6800 Ultra. Or spec the 7800 GTX (!) and the price balloons to £1786. Oof.

    But there's one more, and it's a corker:

    Dell Inspiron 9400 - their newest model, and it has the new Centrino dual core! Do we know what this means? No! But we assume it's dead good. A dual core T2400 @ 1.83GHz with 7800go, 1GB RAM, same 7200rpm HD, and new Centrino 3945 wireless rather than Centrino 2200 comes in at £1179.

    The new Acer 8204 (also a dual core) but higher spec overall including a Radeon x1600 (yum!) is £1650. This should outperform the above.

    Benchmarks required! :-)

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  18. That Acer is a bit uber...

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  19. Well it wont outperform M170 with a 7800gtx for games. But it'll be much smaller and lighter for sure.

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  20. No - I think probably what's happened is some discounts have expired which were present at the time of writing.

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  21. Don't bring a knife to a gunfight boy!

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  22. A current "world shortage" of 7800go cards means that Dell is now only offering an X1400 mobility in their high-end lappies... ouch! The X1400 is lower in spec than a 6600go - so even with a load of discounts currently on offer, its no dice on a new 7800go for the forseeable future :-(

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  23. Dell have upped their gaming laptop spec again. The new one is 2.1ghz(dual core)with a top of the line Geforce 7900GTS with 512meg ram. I'm a nudge away from ordering one of these £1600 babies!!

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  24. Odd they've done that, given the Alienware purchase? I would have thought they'd be moving to consolidate their gaming brand with AW, or vice versa? Haven't heard much at all on that front.

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  25. Yeah, they've not really said anything since the buyout. Last time I checked the Alienware site their top laptops were behind the XPS in terms of power and were higher in price. Its defo a good deal. I'm just waiting for a few more killer games to sway me ;)

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  26. After advice from EED I'm gonna pass for now (all the deals ran out anyway). I'm still tempted so will think about it again down the line, perhaps one GFX generation on. Lurks made some good points about screen res and how it'll struggle and be worth very little 2 years down the line but on the other hand it is still a kick ass mobile pc(fps comparisons to top of the line Non-sli desktops put it 20% lower) and besides, what are bonues for if not to splurge. Plus, while they claim I can't play games on my current laptop (2.5 years old) the truth is I can, just on lower settings and lower res. I finished D3, HL2 and Fear on it with no problems.

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  27. You should see the current Aurora mALX from Alienware. Really nice stuff. I reckon it would mop the flour with most of the current gaming laptops + you get to see the Alienware HQ. Really cool.

    Best Gaming Laptops

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  28. Lest anyone be fooled, the above comment has been made by what we call an 'affiliate whore'. Basically this chap has set up a web site which is nothing more than a bunch of links to various places to buy gear. He's signed up to an affiliate scheme so if you do click through, he gets a percentage cut. The real irony? There's not even a link to Alienware on his stupid affiliate whore page. What's crazy is that this stuff actually works and people like 'alex' rake it in from this stuff.

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  29. Alienware doesn\'t impress me much. I consider them the new Dell of High Preformance Gaming PC\'s. Heck, their websites even look almost identical. Spending that kind of money for a laptop, there are others companies to choose from such as CyberPower or Polywell. My personal favorite is Falcon Northwest. You can\'t beat their looks, They\'ll even overclock it for you, still under warranty.

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  30. There's not actually much in common between an Alienware system and a Dell system on desktops or laptops. On dekstops Alienware is basically build like a small system builder with all the sorts of component choices you'd use if you were building such a system yourself. Eg Asus motherboards, Enermaxx power supply and so on. On laptops Alienware brands ODM manufacturers just like Falcon Northwest or anyone else except that Alienware has brand-x ODM laptop customised further with the Alienware 'id' on the lid Eg. branded wings and lights etc. Might not be such a functional difference or anything like that but I assure you, when it comes to putting it second-hand on eBay, you'll be wishing you bought the Alienware. :-)

    Falcon Northwest or any number of other random no-name manufacturers basically just slap on a badge because that's all that's feasible with the relatively small number of units they are selling. So they have to rely on other gimmicks like overclocking and flogging desktops with windows and even more lights and flourescent tubes etc.

    Dell, on the other hand, is large enough to have Far Eastern ODMs produce laptops for them specifically. That's why there was nothing on the market to touch the M1710 for ages and even now, there's few ODMs making a chassis with the same basic features.

    Anyway, categorically as someone who works for one of the concerned companies, I'm telling you that there's very little in common between the Dell and Alienware in terms of product and levels of support, take that as you will. Boutique operators like Falcon Northwest are all well and good but you're posting on a European web site so some regional North American-only system builder/rebrander is entirely irrelevant to us. Locally we have people doing the same kind of thing like, specialising in laptops specifically, Rock Direct. A very worthy competitor in the ODM reselling space.

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  31. Macbook Pro is the best all around laptop and ATI Radeon 9700 graphics card so great for gaming and incredible for everything else

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  32. I'm sorry, but there's no way any laptop with a 9700 in it can be considered a powerful gaming laptop today. I agree that its an excellent chipset to have in a laptop, and "great" is probably right when compared to an intel chipset of a cheapy 500GBP machine.

    But a 9700 is two year old technology. In fact, I bought my 9700-equipped Acer two years ago and its starting to reach the end of its gaming lifespan. Agree that its better than average, but way out powered by a 7800 of last year.

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