Ideas for gaming laptop which wouldn't cost a fortune?

Title says it all. Your ideas would be greatly appreciated!

how much is a fortune?

What is your budget?

Asus G74 series. Best bang for the buck without going overboard.

CountChocula said:

how much is a fortune?

What is your budget?

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Well, I don't have a budget right now. As low as realistically possible I would say. I am just testing the situation to see if it is viable. If not, I will go for self build PC

Anything with dedicated graphics is going be expensive. If you want to go really cheap, then a laptop with an AMD quad core with AMD ATI integrated graphics would be the best reasonable option. AMD ATI integrated graphics are not bad for reasonable gaming.

Grab self built PC. Laptops are overrated, expensive and you can't just kick'em when you fail in a game.

Yeah joxer, the more I look at it, the less realistic it appears

Thanks guys!

Swing into your local office depot / office max. I frequently find laptops marked down significantly. Granted only 1 in 10 or so have the juice to do any gaming, but I've seen a few specimens that would fit the bill for around 400 or 500 bucks.

I would suggest to shoot for something with 1600x900 or 1920x1080 display if you can afford it - really improved experience for gaming.

However, if you don't mind gaming at 1366x768 or 1280x720, there are quite a few laptops in the $500-600+ range that will run most games just fine at that resolution.

If you want to run games at 1080p, you will likely be looking at something least around $800-900 or more, any laptop with 6770m, 5830/5850m, 7690m, 550m, 555m, 640m, or better DX11 graphics cards will be able to run most games at 1080p. (Not going to run Crysis / Metro2033 at that resolution, but 99% of games)

At 900p, you can find laptops that are a bit cheaper, with weaker GPUs a step down from the ones above, sometimes priced as low as the $600 range or so, depending on the details.

All of the above, however, only describes the current generation of laptops with Sandy Bridge CPUs and 40nm mobile graphics cards.

Just this week Ivy Bridge and 28nm AMD and NVIDIA mobile graphics cards have been announced. In the next few weeks and coming months, you will be able to find cheaper laptops that run games better at 1600x900 and 1920x1080.

zahratustra said:

Title says it all. Your ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Click to expand...

I have an alright gaming laptop. It cost £750, but I had a £100 voucher so 650 for me.

It won't run new games anymore at high settings, but it's 2 years old. At time of purchase it was able to play most games very well at medium settings or so and quite ok at high settings too...

i5 540M
1GB GT 330M
4GB RAM

1366x768 though, so lower resolution.

Toshiba A500-1GM is the name.

Thanks again for your input guys!

ASUS G74 - I've been laptop-only gaming for four or five years now, mostly with the ASUS "G" series. The G74 is good value, allows me to play every game I've tried at mid-high and the unique cooling system stays cool and quiet.