1. 3D Gaming On A Notebook PC: Fantasy Or Reality?

Our four gaming notebook candidates (top to bottom, left to right): Alienware Aurora M7700, Asus A7J, Hewlett Packard Compaq nx9240 and Acer Aspire 5672WLMi

A casual survey of the Websites of the two major graphics chipset vendors, ATI and Nvidia, might lead you to conclude that smooth, flicker-free delivery of modern 3D games on a notebook is as commonplace as snappy Web surfing response times with 54 Mbps LAN connections. No superlative is too much for either company or their supporters, when used to describe the capabilities of their mobile graphics processor portfolios. It's not unusual for graphics processor vendors to describe their products using such terms as unbelievable performance, ultimate, or the best graphics performance in its class. On the other hand, customers tend to feel that it is nearly immaterial which graphics processor is installed in a notebook PC. The truth, as we will demonstrate here, lies somewhere between these two extremes.

Don't do things by halves: This screenshot from the ATI Web site shows only one example of the sometimes confusing messages put forth by graphics processor manufacturers.

This article is designed to answer the question: What kind of gaming graphics performance can you expect from four differently configured and differently priced notebooks? So, you should not be surprised to discover that our group of test candidates includes a little bit of everything available in the notebook market. Acer says that its Aspire 5672 WLmi (ATI Mobile Radeon X1400 with 128 MB of DDR3 RAM ) delivers "a new view of mobile entertainment." Asus shipped us its "ideal personal digital entertainment solution," the A7J, which includes an integrated TV tuner and ATI Radeon X1600 graphics with 256 MB of video RAM. Alienware's, the Aurora m7700 (Athlon 64 dual core processor and NVidia's GeForce Go 7800 GTX mobile graphics processor), is touted on the Alienware site as "an exceptional desktop replacement" and "mobile gaming powerhouse." HP's Compaq nx9430 business notebook (ATI Mobility X1600 graphics processor) is atypical of most notebooks in the company's business line.

Regarding other gaming notebooks, we urge you to check out Part I and Part II of MobilityGuru's review of Dell's XPS M1710 graphics notebook and to watch for an upcoming review of Eurocom's D900K F-Bomb. We had hoped to include an SLI notebook in this review. SLI notebooks are still scarce both for purchase and testing.

Another issue we'll deal with in this review relates to upgrading the graphics capabilities of notebooks. Many vendors have been giving this concept lip service for some time now. We'll tell you exactly what customers should make of such promises, and what kinds of pitfalls lie ahead for those who attempt to go this route.

A comparison test like this one demands a somewhat different set of test scenarios from those we'd run against more typical notebook PCs. That's why we present a short but sharply focused description of the testing scenarios we employed for this comparison in the sections that follows.

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