Gateway P-6860FX
www.gateway.com
$1,349.99

Need to game on the go but can’t muster up enough scratch for a Voodoo Envy? Gateway’s new 17-inch P-6860FX desktop replacement gaming laptop might be the answer.

Thanks to an NVIDIA GeForce Go 8800M GTS with 512MB of GDDR3 video memory and 4GB of DDR2 667 MHz dual channel RAM, this budget gaming notebook demonstrated enough horsepower to run every game we threw at it — even Crysis, a notorious hardware-humbling shooter (though we did have to run it using medium graphics settings, middling resolution, and on DirectX 9).

It staggered a little during the most action packed sequences of a benchmark test using the resource intensive strategy game World in Conflict, but we were able to coax out a solid 30 frames per second with mostly medium visual settings. Other recent games, including Activision’s Call of Duty 4 and BioShock, were essentially stutter-free running at the highest visual settings.

Simply put, it plays games good.

So why the rock-bottom price tag? A weak (relative to other portable gaming rigs) Intel T5550 Core 2 Duo 1.83GHz processor, is one reason. Plus, its screen, while big and bright, tops out at a resolution of 1440-by-900, whereas higher-end gaming laptops typically hit a full 1920-by-1200.

Also, its easily smudged, glossy black shell lacks the elegance and sophistication of a Voodoo laptop and doesn’t offer up the same sort of geeky bedazzlers as an Alienware book — it hasn’t a glowing keyboard, customizable lighting effects, or gills, but instead just a few copper coloured accents and a smattering of lit buttons.

Still, it delivers incredible bang for your buck — especially considering all of its not-necessarily-for-gaming extras, including a capacious 320GB hard drive, HDMI output, dual-layer DVD burner with LabelFlash, Wireless N networking, and Bluetooth.

So, unless you need to see every last wrinkle and pore on your grunts’ faces in Gears of War (and have the thousands of dollars extra required for a laptop capable of generating that sort of detail), you are hereby advised to check out the P-6860FX.