Gaming Laptop Roundup

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that we have covered every gaming laptop currently on the market, and several of the laptops we tested are now sporting outdated components.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.