notebook posts

Okay, no, not quite, but no collection of hideous headline puns that juicy escapes us. The news from Nvidia's neck of the woods is that the Green Eyeball Gang has gotten a bit cozier with both Dell and Apple this week.

For gamers, this certainly doesn't suck on either front, especially since there's a rather tasty bit in the Dell-centric press release that says, "the Dell Studio XPS 13 eliminates the typical notebook compromise between performance and battery life by offering two GeForce GPUs to give users the option of running one GPU for longer battery life, or combining both for greater performance."

SLI? On MY laptop?

To quote the great Federation philosopher J.L. Picard, "Make it so." (h/t to one of my WoW guildies, from whom that line was shamelessly appropriated). Admittedly, the benchmark figures cited (Futuremark and, the not-precisely-cutting-edge 3Dmark06) are a little bit cherry-picked (they're anything but apples-to-apples). Light snark aside, there's certainly no shortage of interest in having a potent but portable rig, especially if your budget dictates that you're going to have to choose either a desktop, or a desktop replacement.

Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Crysis Warhead, Red Alert 3, Diablo 3, StarCraft 2 -- oh my! Folks declaring the death of PC gaming are clearly smoking something, as all those games and more have been making waves at E3 this week. You're going to need a computer to run those, right? Thing is, these days notebooks are outselling desktops by quite a large margin. And for good reason -- who wants a giant, bulky brick uglying up their space?

Hence the rise of gaming laptops. To help you make the call on which one to get and how to configure it, GameDaily has a guide to buying a gaming notebook. It's mostly beginner stuff -- and some of it we kinda wonder about; it asserts that a 1280x800 screen resolution is too low for serious gaming, for example, which we're not sure everyone cares about quite so much. In fact, wouldn't you want a lower screen resolution to ensure that your notebook will be able to handle newer games at the native resolution for a longer time? But all around it's a good intro to what you need to look out for. Give it a read if you're in the market.