| Alienware Vs Rockdirect Vs Dell : Finding The Best Gaming Laptop |
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| Written by Titus Hoskins | |
| Thursday, 02 February 2006 | |
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Page 1 of 4 So you want to buy a gaming laptop.
But not just any old gaming laptop, you want to buy the best gaming machine on the planet, the best gaming machine money can buy - the fastest, the most powerful, the ultimate kick-ass, take no prisoners, meanest motherboard of all gaming laptops. Well, there's some good news for you, things have really changed in the laptop world. No doubt you are probably aware there have been some major developments in laptop construction and technology in the last year or so. Technology that puts the gaming laptop on par or near par with its main rival - the desktop PC. Just in case you have had your head buried in term papers and study sheets lately - hey, it happens! Here's a brief rundown of these new technologies that will give you the fastest gaming laptop: Graphics Cards: these are the real heart of any gaming machine. They are getting faster and more powerful. We also see the use of dual graphics cards and better transfer of data with new pipelines and buses. PCI Express: is a new standard for expansion cards that comes in different versions. Presently, we have the x16 and x1 lanes, they offer increased bandwidth. For example, x1 lane offers 500MB/sec instead of just 133MB/sec for PCI. NVIDIA SLI: SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface, technology that lets you use a couple of GeForce 6800 graphics cards together with PCI Express X16. Basically, SLI will speed up graphics on a single monitor by deploying two graphics cards. It also lets you combine 4 GPUs in one system for the fastest graphics yet. An alternative system would be ATI's CrossFire which is a SLI-like configuration using 'Master' and 'Slave' cards to combine two Radeon GPUs for improved and faster graphics. Hyper-Threading: Gives processors better performance especially when combined with dual-core processors, capable of handling four software threads which will put a smile on any gamer's face. Better RAM: DDR3 SDRAM (Double Data Rate Three Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory) this new DDR memory standard will use 40% less power and run at speeds up to 800 MHz. Don't confuse this with GDDR3 (in Graphics Cards) which is a totally different technology. Dual Core: just as the name says, you put two CPUs into a laptop for more power and faster computing. Rockdirect's Xtreme 64 was one of the world's first dual core notebooks to hit the market. Also be on the lookout for Intel's Dual-Core Notebook Chip dubbed Yonah, it will be somewhat different in that this notebook chip will not only have two cores but these cores will share a 2MB cache which will greatly boost performance.
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