New Blog 1: Gaming Netbook

Tuesday 16 October 2012

Gaming Netbook

To anyone familiar with the hardware demands of today’s 3D computer games, a gaming netbook seems like an impossibility. Designed for portability and affordability at the expense of performance, netbook makers cram inexpensive, and sometimes dated processors, graphics cards and other components into their diminutive laptops and purposefully choose laptop hardware that is light on the power usage. All of these factors add up to a laptop that’s not going to perform well under high graphics processing demands. But there are a select few netbooks or subnotebooks that come close to being able to handle 3D gaming. Here’s a comparison of some of the best.At about $800 MSRP, the Alienware M11x costs more than any netbook you’ll find on the market. But that extra coin goes towards some serious hardware advantages. Packing a Core 2 Duo processor and an Nvidia 335M graphics card with Optimus power-saving technology, this little notebook has a lot of muscle. For about $150 extra, you can even boost it to a Core i3 processor. Both the stock CPU and the upgraded CPU are practically unheard of among netbooks, which tend towards the Intel Atom processor, which, while scrappy for its size and power demands, doesn’t hold a candle to most dual cores.