Folks:
I need to replace my gaming desktop computer, and at the same time also
need to get a laptop. So I thought instead of getting two separate
pieces of equipment, why not just get one good performance laptop which
I can use with a docking station for my gaming needs, and use it
without the docking station, like a regular laptop, at other times.
There are a few potential issues.
1) Continual use at high power (especially gaming) can put
a lot of wear on a laptop. You may find it has a shorter
life as a result, or "maybe" even that it runs too hot and
ends up throttling back to lower speed.
2) Putting a good performance video card in a laptop
reduces it's runtime on batteries, even when you aren't
gaming. Perhaps that's ok to you, I can only speak for
myself in that I find the typical 2-4 hours of runtime from
a fresh/new battery rather short already, and even shorter
after the battery wears over time.
3) Laptops with good video cards are significantly more
expensive, perhaps double the cost increase of similar video
upgrade on an desktop so already some of the cost of the
separate desktop system is offset by the increased cost of
the laptop.
4) If someone steals your laptop, or some kind of severe
hardware malfunction (like dropping it or whatever)
everything is gone, you're out the use of the system.
"Maybe" you mean you'll keepyour present desktop, we can't
know these things. Maybe your present desktop would game
reasonably well if it has a good video card (or that's
added).
I would appreciate it if someone can advise if the follwoing laptop
would be able to meet my gaming needs (UnrealTournament, Battlefield
2142, Quake 4, Half Life2):
HP Pavilion DV9005CA
17.0" AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual Core TL-50 1.6GHz Media Center Laptop
with NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 W/ 128MB (Shared)
1GiG DDR2 RAM
http://www.bestbuy.ca/catalog/prodd...catid=20354&PCName=laptop_hp&logon=&langid=EN
Should I get an Intel Core 2 Duo based laptop instead?
That laptop won't be good at all for gaming. Dual core CPUs
have to be higher-end parts to get good gaming performance,
as most games are still single-threaded. Laptop hard drives
make loading game levels pretty slow too. The video is
"Geforce" which makes it a little better than some Intel
integrated video, but it's still a chipset integrated video
with use of shared memory, far slower than a separate video
card in a laptop can be.
To put it in perspective, An old Athlon XP2400 system with
Geforce4 TI4200 video card would probably be faster at
gaming than that laptop. Something more modern,
substantially faster. If you took your present system,
upgraded the motherboard, CPU, memory, and video card, you
might get away with it costing under $400, (hard to
speculate, we dont' know what it's like nor what games you
want to play) which could be near the same price as the
difference between a laptop with [good gaming CPU and video
card] versus [ lower end CPU and integrated video as you
listed above]. I don't know what gave you the impression
that the above was a "good performance laptop" for gaming
purposes, as the only thing it really has going for it is
the larger screen but that larger screen is an even further
strain on the integrated video, meaning the video has to
push more pixels at the screen's native resolution, OR you'd
have to run at non-native LCD resolution which can look a
bit blurrier.