Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests I want to buy a Laptop

You have to list the things you want to do with it, and then decide what model does most of them well.

The Pentium M models are better for mobility, battery life and efficiency, but they are generally couples with weaker video cards to conserve power.

The Pentium 4M laptops, at the higher speeds, are faster, have larger screens and faster drives. They also have more video card choices.

The true desktop replacements, like the Sagers, use actual non-mobile Pentium 4s and have the fastest video cards, but are heavy (up to 14 lb.) and have terrible battery life (maybe an hour).

No matter what though, laptops will lag behind desktops in game performance. There is always a trade-off to package soemthign in laptop form factor. The Sagers come close, but still lag. The main culprits are slower drives, slower memory and video cards with fewer rendering pipelines.

If you're not buying immediately, i'd wait until the Mobility radeon 9700 debuts in laptops. The benchmarks show it really closes the gaps with desktop video cards. Dell and Sager are usually the first to adopt cutting edge video and 3D. Compaq and IBM lag behind. Sager has also adopted the newer 7200 RPM laptop drives, which help a lot. Then again, do you really want a 14 lb laptop? The Dell Inspiron 8600 lets you configure a 128 MB ATI Mobility 9600 Pro video chip and a higher resolution screen. While the 1.7 Ghx Pentium M is a shade slower than the 3.06 P4M available in the 5150, the video card will be a lot more of an impact to your gaming experience, with a side benefit of being in a lighter package and letting you have very good battery life when not gaming.

If you wait for the ATI mobility 9700 Pro though, the jump in performance will be even greater, but still only in the Inspiron 8600 line. Sager will adopt it, but it's a behemoth.