best Ultrabook for moderate gaming?

[baydude]

What's the best Ultrabook out there for moderate gaming? Looking to buy sometime during the holiday sales. I play SC2, D3 and BF3.

 

[pelov]

Ultrabooks really don't handle gaming all that well, especially not BF3. There's only one Ultrabook that I know of that has a decent enough GPU for gaming (this acer), but even there you've got to suffer with the rather weak CPU.

If you're going to be gaming you really should be looking elsewhere or waiting for Haswell

 

[fishsauce]

This gigabyte 2442 was best I found for the price when I was looking last month:

http://www.dynamism.com/top-notebooks/gigabyte-u2442/pricing.shtml

I eventually went with something larger (Lenovo Y580)

 

[superjim]

Right now the best bang for the buck, regularly priced gaming laptop is the Lenovo Y580 as fishsauce mentions. ~$950 for a gaming powerhouse with a 1080p screen. In Ultrabook land, the best I've seen is the anemic 640m LE (basically a 630) which won't even play BF3 on low settings at 1366x768 with 30fps.

 

[EliteRetard]

What's the best Ultrabook out there for moderate gaming? Looking to buy sometime during the holiday sales. I play SC2, D3 and BF3.

Razer Blade is your only real option.

• Intel® Core™ i7 Quad Core Processor with Hyper-Threading
• CPU: 2.2GHz (Base) / 3.2GHz (Turbo)
• Intel® HM77 Express Chipset
• NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 660M 2GB GDDR5
• 8GB Dual Channel DDR3 at 1600MHz
• 500GB 7200RPM HDD (Primary Storage)
• 64GB SATA III SSD (Cache Acceleration)
• Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit
• 17.3” 1080p 6.4 pound, 0.8”

$2500
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6351/the-new-razer-blade-thoroughly-reviewed/6

 

[ther00kie16]

The Gigabyte actually has a 650m, which is maybe 15% slower than the 660m so it's very serviceable and roughly half the price of the Razer

Razer Blade is your only real option.

• Intel® Core™ i7 Quad Core Processor with Hyper-Threading
• CPU: 2.2GHz (Base) / 3.2GHz (Turbo)
• Intel® HM77 Express Chipset
• NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 660M 2GB GDDR5
• 8GB Dual Channel DDR3 at 1600MHz
• 500GB 7200RPM HDD (Primary Storage)
• 64GB SATA III SSD (Cache Acceleration)
• Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit
• 17.3” 1080p 6.4 pound, 0.8”

$2500
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6351/the-new-razer-blade-thoroughly-reviewed/6

 

[EliteRetard]

Depends if its the GDDR5 version or the DDR3 version. The GTX660m is 30-45% faster than a DDR3 GT650m, 15-20% faster than a GDDR5 GT650m. In the newest games that has shown to be the difference between 18-20FPS and breaking 30FPS.

Also a much faster quad CPU, which will hit higher turbos more frequently and when were comparing to a sub 2GHz dual that will get bottlenecks...add another 10% for the Razer.

Razer Blade could easily be 40-50% faster than the Gigabyte in gaming, and thus worth the premium (besides all the other extra features of the Razer). Need more details on the Gigabyte...

 

[ther00kie16]

http://forum.notebookreview.com/other-manufacturers/669118-gigabyte-u2442-line-56.html#post8913676

Apparently it's GDDR5 but it's true a slower dual core won't be able to compete with the quad. However, the Razer is twice the price of the Gigabyte so I think moderate gamers would prefer it over a $2500 tag, regardless of the performance.