Have gaming laptops become a viable solution?

[DaJones]

First off, I have a sexy desktop that is scorchingly fast.  Yes, I know that the desktop PC will always be superior to a laptop from a performance standpoint.  I'm not looking for a desktop replacement.  The reality of the situation is that I am a 3rd year law student taking a full-time class schedule (evening division), I have a full-time day job at a law firm (at least 40-hours per week), not to mention a full-time girlfriend, family, friends, real life, etc.  I'll take my playtime where I can get it, whether it's an hour from the law library, in the back of a boring class, or from girlfriends couch.  Therefore, a reasonably priced laptop with acceptable performance would really be ideal for me as a supplemental gaming station.  For all intensive purposes, "gaming laptops" were, for the most part, a joke in the past.  But over the last couple of years, it really looks like the specs / performance / cost are catching up (somewhat...).  I've crunched my numbers on Tom's Hardware charts, GPUreview, etc. and looked at all of the benchmarks and tests you could possible run.  I am relatively tech savvy (built my tower at home), but when it comes to laptops, I'm outsourcing the project <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" width="15" height="15" />  I'd welcome any recommendations on boutiques, but what I'm really looking for is some feedback from people with hands-on experience.  I've seen the numbers, but what does that mean when it translates into game performance in EQ2?Budget: $2500Specs I'm toying with:Intel Core 2 Duo T7799 2.4Ghz2048MB, Kingston 667Mhz DDR2NVIDIA GeForce 7950GTX<span></span><span><span style="color: #000000;">100/7200rpm GB SATA-150</span></span>XP home or professionalBottom line: with these specs, what settings can I play EQ2 on?  I've scoured these forums, and no one seems to tackle this question head on.   Most of the comments are along the lines of "laptops are for noobs" or "PC>laptop".   In fact, PC is > laptop for performance, but laptops are also for people with overly demanding real lives (or drifters like myself).  It looks like laptop gaming is making some modest progress in terms of performance (certainly not nipping at the heels of my 8800GTX, but at least moving forward).  My question I guess boils down to: how is the EQ2 experience on a laptop in this price range?  Has laptop gaming made enough progress to be a reasonable solution or is it still a few years away?  Of course, laptop gaming will probably never catch up to the PC, please don't misinterpret the question.  Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.

[Avokk]

Playin with a Dell XPS M1710 since April, love it cant complain, performance wise it really delivers and play with pretty high settings (1920x1200) the monitor is awesomeAlso running Ventrilo, Firefox and ACT parser on background all the time while i play (never crashed EQ2)2go ramCore2 2.16 ?GeForce Go 512mo 7950GTXVista UltimateBeen using it in hotel rooms every night as im on contract and travel quite extensively. Get a good headset and a Logitech VX Revolution mouse and your all set !PS Don't plan on playing on battery, video cards are eating it at ludicrous speeds

[antwar]

<p>if you are not scared of building one yourself, you should check out my thread in this forum about something i was researching myself.</p><p><a href="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=390153" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Click ME!!!!</a></p><p>you would have to purchase your hard drive, CPU, ram, wireless ethernet card, and probably a couple other things i am forgetting at the moment, but it is well worth it for the money you can save. that laptop i linked in myt post should run EQ2 at balanced easily, maybe even a little higher. the place i linked the laptop from also has a custom configureator so if you dont like building it yourself, you can choose the pieces you want and let them build it for you. it would run about 1100-1300 bucks depending on your choices to have them do it for you. if you did it yourself, and got the other parts from other vendors for a better price, you could do a decent laptop for 900-1000 easily. that should be WELL within your budget, and you can use that extra cast for other goodies, such as MS office home and student if you need office apps (about 150 bucks) or a card reader for the other card formats if your digital camera uses a card that is not build in on the laptop, etc. </p><p> hope this helps, and good luck.</p>