For Gaming

If you want a full-power gaming experience on the move, or high-quality sound and graphics for a portable entertainment system, think big. We’ve seen a 20” model from Rock with Scalable Link Interface graphics and two Nvidia GeForce Go 7950 chips, the £2,500 Xtreme SL Pro which weighs in at 6.9 kg. Dell’s XPS M2010 20” weighs even more - 8.2 kg – but it also has a detachable wireless keyboard, 7.1 digital sound with a built-in sub-woofer and an ATI Mobility Radeon 1800 plus an £1800 price tag. By comparison the 5.4 kg 20” HP Pavilion HDX (the Dragon) is a lightweight, but it has Core 2 Duo, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2600 XT, digital TV, eSATA and dual hard drives, built-in Webcam and fingerprint reader, HD DVD and HDMI, four speakers and subwoofer – and a media centre remote control that pops out of the keyboard.

But most gaming notebooks – from Voodoo, Alienware, Dell, PackardBell, HP, Toshiba and Asus as well as some specialist manufacturers – weigh in at a more manageable 3.5 to 4 kg with a 17" widescreen display and 1920 x 1200 resolution. With a screen that size, there’s room for a larger keyboard, sometimes with a full numeric keypad; for games that use the keypad that’s a lot better than having it mapped as a function onto the main keyboard. You’ll also get a full set of ports and memory card slots.

The Sony VAIO VGN-AR21S has a Blu-ray burner, an HDMI port in case the screen still isn’t big enough and a combo analogue/digital TV tuner. It uses the same GeForce Go 7600 as the Toshiba Qosmio Q30-204 which has an HD DVD drive and TV tuner, which means neither of them have top-end gaming graphics, but you can still play most games at native resolution if you don’t push the detail too high. The HP Pavilion dv9292eu has the same graphics, a Freeview tuner and Altec Lansing speakers but with an AMD Turion 64 and a standard DVD burner it’s a much more affordable £899. Like the Packard Bell EasyNote SW and the Alienware Area 51 m9750, the Qosmio and Pavilion models have a second hard drive bay to make it easy to expand the system (or set up RAID to improve performance on some models).

A 17” screen doesn’t always mean you’re getting a gaming system; some of these systems are designed as mobile workstations for video editing and design so check the sound, screen resolution and spec.You’ll find some extreme gaming notebooks with a desktop CPU like a Core 2 Extreme. As well as using more power than a Core 2 Duo designed for a laptop, these need more cooling; if you have four fans in a laptop case you may not be able to perch it on your knee. Hang on for models using the brand new 2.6 GHz Core 2 Extreme X7800 mobile CPU instead; you’ll even be able to overclock them.