Gaming Laptop Roundup

Standard Gaming Performance

Starting the benchmarks, we'll cut right to the chase and begin with gaming performance. That's what you buy one of these laptops for, after all. As mentioned in our last article, we have recently updated our laptop gaming benchmarks. We use built-in performance tests on Company of Heroes, Crysis, Devil May Cry 4, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and Unreal Tournament 3. For Assassin's Creed, GRID, Mass Effect, and Oblivion we benchmark a specific scene using FRAPS. In all tests, we run each benchmark at least four times, discard the top result, and report the highest remaining score. We will use resolution scaling graphs to compare the different laptop configurations, as that will allow us to examine how the GPU and CPU affect performance. At lower resolutions we should become more CPU limited, while the higher resolutions and detail settings should put more of a bottleneck on the GPU.

The Gateway notebooks obviously offer a lot of bang for the buck, even if they don't top the performance charts. The Alienware m15x is faster overall, but the margin of victory over the P-7811 is only about 7% (around 25% over the P-171XL). As we mentioned in our Gateway P-7811 review, there also appears to be a driver glitch with the P-171XL in Devil May Cry 4 - which incidentally is the only game where we don't see significant performance improvements from SLI at higher resolutions. The Sager NP9262 is clearly in a league of its own when it comes to performance. If you've ever wondered why people would consider purchasing a heavy SLI notebook, gaming performance that's almost twice as fast as the closest single GPU solution is the answer. Unfortunately, that means the CPU becomes more of a bottleneck, which is why we see several games where the Sager laptop has an almost flat line.