How good are laptops for playing games?

[StevenMara]

I am thinking of getting one in the $400 (used), so on eBay I have seen some with P4 1.6GHz and Celeron 2-2.2 GHz and I think at least 256MB RAM. What kind of video processing do these have, onboard? How well would UT2004 and CS:S work?

 

[Jeff7]

In all likelihood, not very well. If it's Intel integrated graphics - forget it. Try Half Life 1 at 640x480 and you might be alright.
If it's maybe something by ATI, you might be a bit better off, but a lot will use shared RAM. I have ATI's IGP 340M in this laptop, and it can play HL1 at 1024x768 at a playable framerate, though I don't remember how well it did anymore. No antialiasing either.

You'd want something with dedicated video RAM.

 

[StevenMara]

How much would a used laptop with dedicated video ram be?

 

[Crescent13]

my laptop

p4 2.8 northwood
768 mb ram (128 shared) therefore, 640 usable ram
Radeon 9000 IGP

would play half-life 2 at 1024x768 with 16x AF.

 

[doinmybestatlast]

Freecell - best and only game that plays superbly on Intel graphics

 

[w00t]

a dell xps would play source but you could only play for like 30min i bet.

 

[Crescent13]

This would run your games! 5 minutes of extreme mobile gaming!

 

[FishTankX]

Acer ferrari series gets decent batterylife AND performance

 

[StevenMara]

Battery life doesn't matter, I would use the AC adapter

 

[Southparkrocks]

Will a 1.6 Pentium M with one gb of memory but with only 32mb vid card play hl1 or mayble hl2 on all low with lowest res ok?

 

[StevenMara]

How about a P3 1.2 GHz with 512MB ram and an ATi Radeon mobile 16MB ram?

 

[stevty2889]

How much are you looking to spend? You can get a laptop with a 1.6ghz Pentium-M, mobile radeon 9700, 40gb HD, 512mb of ram, for just under $1100, I am highly considering that one myself.

A 16mb mobile radeon is still old and not gonna handle much, the one with the 1.6 pentium-m, and gig of ram..it really depends on what the 32mb video is..if it's intel its not gonna work well, if it's at least a ati 9000 it will probably handle HL2 at a low res.