Portability and Power

I apologize if this is in the wrong forum, but it's pretty gaming-oriented so I went with this one.

I was just curious if you all know any fairly decent small gaming notebooks (to play the likes of civ4, or other semi-new but not too taxing...not crysis!) I'm thinking 12"-14.1".

So far my searching has led me to the Dell xps 1330 or a 14.1" Lenovo T61.

Any other fish in the sea?

Thanks all.

 

Asus F8Sn
(10 char)

 

Holy cow. 512mb video memory for the F8Sn? You rarely even see that in 15" notebooks.

I've heard asus has pretty bad battery life though...

 

Sony VGN FZ-290 is what i have. 3 Hours long battery life (on balanced or high performance..i dunno).

u get 8400M GT DDR3 which is great for gaming. It can run COD4 on all highest settings with playable framerates. Its 15.4" (kinda bigger of what you want). But to be honest, gaming notebooks start at 15.4" and if you go any smaller, you wont get the performance u demand =\

 

Thanks miscolobo.

I'll check it out!

 

If you're willing to get a 15.4" size laptop, you can get much better GPUs than a low-end 8400....

For that size, I consider the 8600/9500 as the minimum I'd settle for.

 

Vram is a bad measure of gpu performance; there are other things to consider such as clock speeds and bus width/type

 

sszero is right. Discrete graphics solutions consist of three parts: the memory, the GPU itself (which is little more than a processor), and the memory bus connecting the two. The memory actually has the smallest impact of the three.

 

I would look at dell xps1530, hp 8510p, Thinkpad T61p, and the LG P300.

 

It's not a GREAT choice for a serious gamer, but for the casual gamer, I've found my HP dv2500t to have the right mix of performance, portability, and battery life, and the newer ones come with more video memory on the 8400M so they'll run much better than mine does.

 

If you are okey with 15.4, then I would definitely recommend the m1530. It comes with the 8600GT DDR3 by default, and can, with a little OC, handle CRYSIS on med-hi settings with playable framerate. As for CoD4, I was able to max out every single option and still get 60 fps with 1440x900. Really a great laptop for its price (compared to the 15.4inch m15x...).

PS. Games like Civ 4 depend more on Memory than GPU...if you got enough memory, say, 3 gigs under vista, then you should be able to max out the game and have a smooth gameplay experience with an okey graphics card. i.e. 8400 gs/gt.

 

Not quite accurate, Civ 4 and its 2 expansions are extremely tasking on the processor first, graphics 2nd and memory 3rd. I max out everything playing the game and can assure you that the 2-5 second pause between a city announcement for wonder completion and wonder movie is down to my GPU and CPU not being quite up to the task.

 

I think the XPS M1330 is the best one I found and the one I got because it has great balance of power, portibility, and good battery life too! and it isn't massively huge like other laptops especially HC Gamer notebooks I am a HC Gamer but I do it mostly on my PS3! YEEHAW!