15. Conclusion

I spent a good amount of time kicking the tires of the ABS Mayhem G3, to see what I liked and disliked about it. I was able to conclude that it is a good system. Yes, ABS does not hold the crown for the fastest notebook on the market, but it is a solid performer. Its GPU might not beat a Corvette (Geforce Go 6800) and maybe not even a Camaro (MR9800), but it still has a lot of horsepower under the hood. After all, there are many people out there with desktops running Geforce4 MX400 graphics cards who somehow still try to play high-end games.

Of course we also must take price into account in assessing the relative merits of these notebooks. The Geforce Go 6800 notebook took first place in the mobile market and even beat out some desktop cards, but rings in at a rather eye-popping $3,643. The Dell XPS, which took second place in most of the notebook tests, has a similar sticker price of $3,676. In contrast, the Mayhem G3 is about $1,600 cheaper. You could almost order two for the price of one of the others!

The game play in UT2004 and all of the other games (Excluding Far Cry and Doom 3) was smooth and enjoyable at "regular settings." The screen is fine for gaming, with minimal ghosting that is to be expected and should not interfere with play. One problem that did stand out on the monitor was some vignetting - darkening near the edges of the panel that appears as a shadow in the corners and on the sides of the display.

Bottom line: if you need to have a hardcore system that you can play games on or just want a blazingly fast office productivity notebook, the Mayhem is for you. If you are looking to play Doom 3 with all of the eye candy turned on to the highest possible settings, this system will disappoint. My guess is that the Mayhem G4 is already in the works, and it will have one of the top dogs inside it.