Cheap Gaming Laptop

A Cheap Gaming Laptop Is A Rare But Powerful Bird

A cheap gaming laptop is the ultimate in mobile entertainment for the avid game player.  While there are many powerful laptops on the market, it takes a special machine to be considered a gaming notebook.   While $600 can land you a primo machine to surf the web with or knock out that last minute term paper, it has several limitations that will prevent it from being a “gamer” class machine.  This is the core difference between a business class notebook or student laptop deals.  If your looking for the cheapest laptop deals in a gaming notebook, you’ll find cheap to mean at least $1800.

The most critical difference between the two types of notebook crops up in the video card. Business class machines often contain a video chipset that is integrated into the motherboard, and shares its resources with the system memory.  A gaming notebook will come equip with a gaming class video chipset that is independent of other system resources, as well as jam packed with video ram.  Most of them are equipped standard with 1gb of dedicated video ram, and a 1ghz gpu to competently run the most graphic intensive video game.  As is to be expected Nvidia and ATI lead the pack with regards to gaming graphic chips.

Ram is just as important in a notebook as is the video card.  Even budget video cards are equipped with 3-4 GB of ram standard.  This is more than enough for surfing and multitasking on most notebook computers.  This will also work for gaming, but it’s not only the amount of ram, but the speed of the ram as well.  Ram comes in a variety of flavors which are optimized for all sorts of tasks.  4gb of optimized ram will run a couple $100 more than the standard amount of ram in a budget machine.  Alienware gaming notebooks are usually stuffed with the best ram available, optimized to run on 64 bit machines and applications.

Your processor should be your next consideration.  We prefer a machine with an I7 chipset because they are quite simply the cream of the crop for all things notebook.  They are optimized for 64 bit OS’s such as Window 7, and make gaming a dream.  With a humongous system bus it makes full use of available ram and video GPU processing.  Anything short of an I7 will amount to an avid gamer shorting themselves of a quality gaming experience.

The rest of your components will be up to debate, but there is nothing in a gaming laptop that should be skimped on.  Your hard drive should be no less than 7200rpm, but optimally you’ll want to look into a SSD (solid state disk) which has no moving parts and a large bus for fast access.  A dedicated control system such as a USB 2.0 pad is also a good idea which will keep your main keyboard and mouse in health performing condition.

Deals on gaming laptops or a cheap gaming laptop are really a relative idea.  $1500 barely gets you in the door and $2000 is a good machine.  If you want to remain frag free and mobile, you’re going to pay a little bit of money, but the ability to game anytime and be competitive will be well worth the cost.