Conclusion
After untold hours of testing, we have finally finished this roundup of gaming laptops. That's not to say that we have covered every gaming laptop currently on the market, and several of the laptops we tested are now sporting outdated components. However, we have enough familiarity with the various offerings that we feel comfortable in making some recommendations.
The first thing you need to realize going in is that gaming laptops aren't your everyday laptop. Yes, they are more than capable of running all of the tasks that you would do on a typical business laptop, but the addition of a high-end graphics card invariably means that battery life will be a secondary consideration. Alienware has shown that there are ways to get around this, and hopefully we will see more of that in the future, but the Alienware m15x still depends on brute force in a sense to provide long battery life. You might think offhand that achieving over four hours of battery life is a real accomplishment, but two batteries providing 97 Whr of total power isn't quite the same as being energy efficient. The ability to shut off the discrete GPU on the other hand is something we should have seen years ago. What we really need now is that same functionality for SLI notebooks.
Speaking of brute force, the Sager NP9262 manages to power through our gaming benchmarks at speeds that make most other laptops cower in fear. The thing is an absolute monster, both in terms of performance and in sheer size, with frame rates at higher resolutions almost doubling the other notebooks. Users were primarily interested in a portable gaming machine will definitely appreciate everything that the Sager NP9262 offers. If you prefer alternatives, the Dell M1730 is almost as fast and is slightly smaller, but where you can get 9800M GT SLI and a quad-core processor with the NP9262 now, the M1730 continues with dual-core processors and 8800M GTX SLI. Since neither is small and prices are similar, performance junkies will prefer the NP9262.
The Alienware m15x is in many ways the most interesting notebook we've tested. In a sense, it's a taste of things to come. It's the first 15.4" notebook we've tested that doesn't skimp on gaming performance, and we like the Smart Bay that gives us the ability to add a second battery in place of an optical drive. The BinaryGFX in particular is ahead of its time, and while we would prefer not having to reboot in order to switch between discrete and integrated graphics, it's still a far better than not being able to save power and extend battery life. We expect to see a few more notebooks in our labs in the next month that support the Centrino 2 version of Alienware's BinaryGFX, and we look forward to seeing how the implementations differ. It's unfortunate that the m15x just doesn't feel as durable as we would like, and given the price that's something that needs to be addressed.
As much as we like the power of the Sager NP9262 and the interesting features of the Alienware m15x, for many people the Gateway P-7811 is the best overall choice. Gaming performance is within striking distance of the m15x, and battery life is better in most cases except when using two batteries on the Alienware. The big concern with the P-7811 is something we covered in our previous article, namely instability. We have not yet received a solution to the periodic lockups that we've experienced. Besides that, the chassis feels bulkier than it needs to - we would prefer a thicker laptop rather than the protruding battery - and LCD quality isn't quite as good as competing laptops. For under $1500, however, only the instability is a serious concern. If we receive a solution, we will be sure to update this article. A decent alternative to the P-7811 in the meantime is the P-173XL (the replacement of the P-171XL), which costs a bit more but doesn't have the stability issues. Still, we would prefer the better performance and battery life of the P-7811. We might simply have a lemon in terms of our test notebook, so if you have a local Best Buy with the P-7811 in stock, you might want to just give it a shot.
Update: As mentioned on page 5, updating the graphics drivers to the hacked 177.92 Vista 64-bit drivers at LaptopVideo2Go.com seems to have cleared up the stability concerns. While the P-6831 FX received a Gold Editors' Choice upon release, the bar has since been raised. The P-7811 makes a lot of meaningful upgrades to the P-6831, but given it uses the Centrino 2 platform, the lack of Hybrid Power as a feature (and the bulky chassis) is no longer something we can wholeheartedly recommend. The price/performance offered is way ahead of the competition, however, so provided you don't mind the design or missing features we have no other remaining reservations.
Wrapping things up, while all of these laptops are good none of them are great. There are enough minor concerns that we are not willing to give any of them an editor's choice award. Sager offers pure performance, Gateway offers good performance at a great price, and Alienware provides a laptop that can cater to gamers that also like to cut the wires on occasion and run for hours on a battery (or two). These laptops cater to different market, and they all do so successfully. If you're in the target market and are looking for a new notebook, we wouldn't hesitate to recommend any of these notebooks.
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Th3G4mbl3r - Saturday, August 30, 2008 - link
can you also laptop from killernotebook.com into the review as well? they are similar to the sager systems in the sense that they are also custom built based on ODM chassis by Mark from killernotebook. I am keen on looking at some head on comparisons for those with the rest of the field.JarredWalton - Sunday, August 31, 2008 - link
It's difficult to properly evaluate service and support, but since all three companies offer the same Clevo D901C notebook seen in this review, consider this configuration:1920x1200
Q9550
2x9800M GT
2x2GB RAM
3x320GB HDD in RAID 5
Blu-ray Recorder
3-year Warranty
Sager NP9262: $4538.00
AVADirect D901C: $4659
Killer Notebooks Odachi: $5174
There's no ability to select a warranty at KillerNotebooks.com (it's 1-year according to the "About Us" page), and the site layout does not instill confidence. The support section doesn't even list 8800M or 9800M drivers for the Odachi (apparently misspelled "Odach" in various locations). I'm definitely not going to recommend spending $500 or $600 more to get the same notebook with a lesser warranty.
SpacePope - Saturday, August 30, 2008 - link
Thanks for the review, this is a good start. I've been researching gaming laptops myself lately because I plan on buying one soon. From what I've seen so far, the Asus G50V-A2 seems to have the most bang for the buck. Can you add this laptop to the review?Core 2 Duo T9400 2.53Ghz
15.4" WSXGA+ (1680 x 1050)
4GB DDR2
2 x 7200rpm 200GB HD in raid
Blu-ray drive
NVIDIA GeForce 9700M GT (512MB VRAM DDR3)
All for only $1899 on newegg (and I'm sure you can find it on sale somewhere).
Personally, I think alienware is VERY over priced and a horrible value. They even use slower 667Mhz ram and last generation video cards. I've never heard anything good about their customer service. You can easily spend $1000 more on the alienware and get a worse laptop than the Asus. The gateway's are a good deal (and tempting) but I want a 15.4" screen, not 17". Finally, I don't know or trust Sager yet.
JarredWalton - Saturday, August 30, 2008 - link
I've requested a couple ASUS laptops, so we'll see. Outside of the 15.4" part, I'd rate the Gateway higher in every area. However, form factor is a pretty major consideration. I expect the 9700M GT will be around 65-75% of the performance of the P-7811, so with a lower maximum resolution it should run pretty well.As for Sager, they have been selling laptops (with a moderate focus on enthusiast models) for over 20 years - since 1985. I would have no problem recommending them as a company. As such, the NP2096 is one option (15.4" 1680x1050, 9600M GT, P9500 CPU, 4GB RAM, and 320GB HDD for ~$1550). For more gaming performance, check out the NP8660. It's more expensive than the ASUS, the the 9800M GT is about twice as fast as the 9700M GT I'd guess. It actually looks quite similar to the m15x in terms of specs, for a lot less money. $2300 for a nearly top-end config. Too bad there's no Smart Bay battery, and I don't know if you can disable the discrete GPU.
Voldenuit - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
" this is the first laptop we've tested that includes the option to shut off the discrete graphics and use integrated graphics."Cough. A bit behind the times on laptops, are we? Several Asus and Sony models have featured this already, going back as far as 2 years ago.
The Montevina refresh to the thinkpad T series (T400, T500) allow you to switch between integrated and discrete (Radeon 36xx) graphics on-the-fly in Vista. Now we're talkin'!
JarredWalton - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
"first laptop we've tested" says it all. I know perfectly well that others have done it, and I mention (repeatedly) that the Centrino 2 offerings are supposed to improve that functionality. Now I just need to get the appropriate companies to send laptops for review, which is always the difficult part. Still, the feature is far more useful IMO when you're using it with high-end GPUs. Switching between 8400M and IGP isn't as critical as switching between 8800M/9800M and IGP.Jumpman23 - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
Another great "budget" gaming laptop would be the Asus G50V. The specs show the price to performance ratio is very good and comes equipped with 9700M GT. I would love to see a review on it.yyrkoon - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
I would like to mention that the Sager seems to use close to what A 'medium power' Desktop would use for power consumption(minus the monitor). That is *if* these figures you're showing are accurate compared to my readings (or vice versa).Let me define a 'medium power' desktop system:
ABIT IP35-E
Intel E6550 @ 2.8Ghz
2x2GB A-DATA 1.8v DDR2-800
eVGA 9600GT 512MB
1x DVD/CD burner(Liteon if applicable)
4x HDDs (all Seagate if applicable)
Antec Earthwatts 500
Again, to be fair, what I measured was just the hardware in the case, so there are no LCD/CRT monitor figures counted in. At idle the above system uses 124-125W. while web surfing and doing other non intensive tasks the system above uses 128W-135W. With a full load on the CPU using orthos for an hour with 2 threads running(100% CPU load), this system uses 171-174W. In World of conflict, using the in game benchmark with everything maxed(no AA or AF) this machine has peaked up to 215W. Running the same benchmark with the game output limited to 30FPS uses only 195W peak, but mostly between 185-190W.
World in conflict I have noticed so far can use by far the most power while gaming. Games such as Hellgate: London, and FEAR use around 180-195W(everything maxed).
As a kind of interesting side comparison I checked the older card I used before the 9600 GT (eVGA 7600 GT KO edition) peak idle was 106w, while peak gaming was 168W. Much lower than I had anticipated. Granted the 9600GT is also lower in power usage than I had originally thought based on reviews, and about twice as fast as the 7600 GT in most games.
Now I am very interested in how much power the new Intel mini ITX board, with x4500HD graphics and a reasonably powered desktop CPU would use. You hearing me Jarred? Derrick ? Anand ?! Would be nice if you guys could find out for all of us ; ) Something tells me that it'll only be marginally lower in power consumption though . . .
yyrkoon - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
Monitor I use is a 19" widescreen LCD. Native resolution of 1440x900, so that is the resolution I tend to play games in. All of my figures are based on a 1440x900 resolution(for what it is worth).JarredWalton - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
I think Gary will have an X4500 article up next week. Don't quote me on that, as I know Gary and Anand have run into quite a few issues with the G45 testing, but it's not for lack of trying.As for power requirements, I figure the LCD is using between 10W and 20W of power, and while it might be using as much power as your midrange desktop, it also happens to be faster. You'd need 9600 GT SLI at the very least (~equal performance), or 8800 GT SLI (faster performance).
The other item that we don't know is power supply/power brick efficiency. If they're both 80% efficient, that's one thing, but if the laptop is 70% efficient and your desktop is 80% efficient, that could account for another 20W or so. Anyway, since this *is* a desktop replacement, it's not too surprising that the power requirements extend into desktop territory.