kk. thank you!!!

-T

You may need to use books or something else to keep the laptop in the air, because usually the fans are put on the bottom of the laptop.  This means that unless it is floating in midair, at least some of the vents will always be useless.

I didn't learn that for a long time, and kept wondering why the laptop would just shut off with higher performance games.  Now it can run many of them with maximum graphics.

To give you a price range...I got a gaming laptop at a pawnshop for 600 canadian dollars (yes laugh at me all you want but the laptop was originaly worth 1.2K can $ so I'm damn happy!) Had absolutely NO issues with it since I bought it.

Its strong enough for Mass Effect, NWN2, Mass Effect....Everything except Crysis and CoD4 (thats my desktops job). So ya I'll put up full specs so you can compare with what your palnning on getting!

Right now on I only use Sins of my laptop.  I can run it at these settings:

Resolution: 1440x900 at 60hz
Planet Detail: High
Ship Detail: High
Ship Extras: High
Ship Bump: Low
Building Detail: Medium
Building Extras: Medium
Building Bump: Low
Bloom: Disabled
AA: Disabled

My Specs:

OS: Windows XP Pro 32 Bit
CPU: Pentium M 1.6ghz (clocked at 2.33ghz)
Memory: 1gb Ram at 300 something mhz
Video Card: ATI Mobility Radeon 9600/9700 64mb
FPS: 60fps at begining, 30 at end of game

If you buy a new entry level laptop with a non integrated video card you should be able to run sins at max settings at 60fps fine.  My laptop is old and works great, if you use Vista though it may run slower.

OS: Windows Vista x64

CPU: Intel core 2 duo 2.5ghz

Memory: 4gb RAM

Video: Nvidia GeForce 8600 GS

I can run Sins with everything turned to Highest on huge maps, with no slowdown untill you get to the end game massive fleets, or you encounter mine spam in entrenchment. If you get Vista, get as much RAM as possible.

I wouldn't use the current Entrenchment build as any benchmark, since IC pretty much admitted it's not really optimized.

teal i am using sins on a toshiba l20  winxp 1.25gb ram (upgraded from 512mb) 160gb hd (upgraded from 40gb) cpu is a celeron 1.8, and sins runns smoothly.

the laptop was given to me to salvage as it stopped working, but I found the problem was the power supply.

by the way the suggestion of supporting the laptop above a solid serface is a VERY GOOD idea, one suggestion is a large wire cake rack as their called in aus

harpo

   This is Marvelous!!!!   Thank you for so many wonderful posts!!!  I have no idea about lap tops, so will have to start looking and not talking to the sales people, not that they aren't helpful, but sometimes a little too much "buy now" and i think i'm going to need some time just to get my bearings and figure out what is what and to compare prices. THank you for the specs, though the specs are a little over my head, i dont know a gb from a mhz and the numbers on the video cards are all greek, sorry to sound stupid, but i dont know which are higher, or lower, or better, though i did have a friend tell me as many mentioned here that the separate video card is way more what we want. 

The money is still a couple months away, i'm thinking of getting it after the refund checks from taxes, so will be looking then, and don't know exactly how much i can afford to spend, but i have seen some on ads that were like $399, but didnt know if that was way too low or not. My guess was it was too low.

Anyway, by then i should have a real good idea of what to look for, and my friend said he would go with me to look at them when it came time to decide, so i'm happy for that. 

Thank you thank you thank you to everyone for such detailed and nice explanations and what it's like, i feel more confident now, and i still dont have much of a clue, but more than i did before and for that i am grateful!!! 

Thank you again, keep gaming and keep modding!!!!   

-Teal

i dont know a gb from a mhz and the numbers on the video cards are all greek, sorry to sound stupid, but i dont know which are higher, or lower, or better, though i did have a friend

Hey Teal

It doesn't sound stupid, if you don't know much about computers, has long as the computer do what you want it to do that's all that matters in my opinion.

Here is some info that will help you understand Gb's and Mhz.

(Gb) stand for Gigabyte which is measurement of a Hard Disc Drive storage capacity. 1Gb is 1,073,741,824 bytes, or 1024Mb's. The higher the number of Gb the more programs and files you can have stored on the HDD.

(Mhz) & (Ghz) stand for Megahertz & Gigahertz which is measurement of the CPU (Central Processing Unit) processing speed. The higher the speed the fastest the CPU can do things. There are other things has well like the cache memory size and the (FSB) Front Side Bus speed, I could go on and on and on but I won't.

If you would like more info on this check out these link's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mhz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_processing_unit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_side_bus

The money is still a couple months away, i'm thinking of getting it after the refund checks from taxes, so will be looking then, and don't know exactly how much i can afford to spend, but i have seen some on ads that were like $399, but didnt know if that was way too low or not. My guess was it was too low.

In answer to your question, it depends on how much you want to spend on the laptop and what games you would like to play on it. A good gaming laptop is going to be about £1000, but you would get a great gaming desktop for the same amount of money.

Here are few high gaming laptop specs

15.4-inch Widescreen LCD
2.8GHz Intel® Core™2 Extreme X9000
512MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 9800M GT
4GB DDR2 Memory & 1GB Turbo RAM
320GB 7,200 RPM Hard Drive
2x Blu-ray™ Burner

Price from: £2,899

15.4-inch Widescreen LCD
Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme – 2.8Ghz
NVIDIA® GeForce® 9800M GT
Up to 4GB of 667MHz DDR2 Memory
Up to 1TB HD Space with Smart Bay Extreme HD Video and Audio

Price from: £999

The above laptops are from this site http://www.alienware.co.uk/main.aspx If it was me spending the money I would go for this one below, but has you would probably guess I would change the configuration to the Max.

http://www.alienware.co.uk/product_d...de=SKU-DEFAULT

Here is the Nvida SLI Notebook PC Gaming site.

http://www.slizone.com/object/slizon...lt_nb_us2.html

Here are some good Dell XPS gaming laptops.

http://www.dell.com/content/products...52538~0~821509

Here is a reviewing site on gaming laptops.

http://www.bizwaremagic.com/best_gaming_notebooks.htm

I hope the above info helps you.

I use a scrollwheel mouse/trackball because of touchpad difficulties

harpo

My laptop can allow me to max ever thing and still run fine