Laptops All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies- P43 docx

Book V: Playing with Multimedia 394 27 140925-bk05ch03.qxp 4/8/08 12:48 PM Page 394 Chapter 4: Gaming with a Laptop In This Chapter ߜ Gaming to the outer fringes ߜ Tricking out a laptop for gaming ߜ Extreme processors and laptops L et us together agree on two very important and quite disconnected facts: ✦ The first computers were designed for very mundane tasks like totaling up the profits at an ancient Babylonian tag sale or mechanizing the manufacture of a knitting mill. ✦ Given the chance, nearly every man and woman will attempt to turn even the most sophisticated of tools into a toy. Therefore, it comes as absolutely no surprise that as soon as the first personal computers began arriving in homes and offices, games began to arrive on computers. Among the first: simple card games like solitaire, basic shoot-em-ups, and simple adventure games that used keyboard commands and the player’s imagination to conjure up an imaginary world of twisty, turny passages and bizarre underworld creatures. And then, it should be even less a surprise that when the first laptop comput- ers arrived in the marketplace, the push was on make them available as portable gaming machines (in addition to managing huge product databases, human resources files, and e-mail on the road). Stuffing a Wild Laptop In many ways, a modern laptop computer is a mini-me version of a desktop computer: It can do (or be adapted to do) anything a full-sized computer can. The solution isn’t always neat and elegant, though. The original concept for a laptop was to bring together all the disparate pieces of a desktop machine — keyboard, mouse, monitor, and speakers among them — into a single, small, two-part box. Today a laptop lets you play most any game available on a desktop. The trick, though, is this: finding a way to play the game at a speed, volume, and clarity that equals or surpasses the capabilities of a desktop machine fully tricked out with upgrade, accessories, and doodads. 28 140925-bk05ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:49 PM Page 395 Stuffing a Wild Laptop 396 The good news: It’s possible. The bad news: You need to start with an absolutely top-of-the-line laptop, and you’re going to have to spend a lot of money to buy it and upgrade it. If your idea of computer gaming is Solitaire, you don’t need to read any further in this chapter. If you’re looking for 3D, multiplayer, fully immersive games with surround sound, get out your checkbook. Basically, you need a laptop with no compromises. Most laptops are designed to be lightweights: small, simplified components that sip very shallowly from the supply of electrical power stored in their battery. None of these are con- cerns for desktop makers, and most game designers don’t give much (if any) thought to the amount of power and real estate their games demand. They want to astound users with graphics and sound and action . . . not portability. For instance, some people are perfectly happy with a little car with two seats and a tiny trunk, powered by a hamster cage of an engine that runs for hun- dreds of miles on a few gallons of gasoline; that pretty perfect specification is for a vehicle that’s for point-to-point commuting and it makes eminent eco- nomic and ecological sense. But then there are people who, for reasons that vary from real necessity to issues of ego and irrational competitive urges, must own either a street-legal race car that guzzles gas like a drunken sailor or a monster truck capable of carrying a herd of cattle. You clearly don’t need a cattle truck to drive from your home to the convenience store to pick up a bag of chips, and a race car looks cool — but very silly — caught up in bumper-to-bumper traffic at rush hour. But back to gaming: If you want to use your laptop to play Halo 2 or Madden NFL Football or to take part in a massive nationally networked role-playing game, you just might need a laptop that looks like a Hummer with the horse- power of a Ferrari under the hood. Here’s your Top Ten shopping list for a laptop that you use for some serious gaming: ✦ The fastest and most powerful microprocessor you can find. You don’t want to compromise on a processor whose primary selling feature is the fact that it draws less power, generates less heat, or costs less money. ✦ Lots of RAM. The more the merrier, up to the maximum supported by the motherboard, the processor, and the operating system. On many modern laptops that means 2GB to 4GB. Oh, and be sure to use the fastest design of memory supported by your system. ✦ A high-speed advanced graphics card. The basic built-in graphics chips offered on most laptop computers just doesn’t cut it when the future of the entire human race is threatened by an incoming Argrulikan Triple- Twisted Death Ray Beam. For the best performance, you want a laptop 28 140925-bk05ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:49 PM Page 396 Book V Chapter 4 Gaming with a Laptop Stuffing a Wild Laptop 397 that comes with a built-in graphics card with its own video memory; a tiny handful of specialized laptops even allow the manufacturer to customize the system with the card of your choice (provided a shrunken version installs within your laptop’s case). ✦ A full-featured sound card. This is more a want than a need, but if you’re serious about gaming you’re not going to want to settle for the basic facil- ities of sound chips on the laptop’s motherboard; you’re going to want SoundBlaster or similar circuitry added to the system. Advanced audio features include spatial imaging, which is a bit of electronic magic that can make sounds seem to move from place to place or to originate from behind. ✦ An amplified, external set of speakers. Although some laptops now offer sorta-kinda acceptable speakers in the case, they can’t come any- where close to the strength, volume, and clarity of a large set of external speakers with their own powered amplifiers. If you’re going to use your laptop at home or another fixed location — or if you don’t mind carrying a suitcase packed with a set of speakers — you can attach external speakers, including 2.1 systems (left, right, and subwoofer), 3.1 (left, right, center, and subwoofer), or 5.1 (left, right, center, rear left, rear right, and subwoofer). Another alternative: a high-quality set of head- phones that bring the hiss and rumble of the death ray directly into the recesses of your ear canals. ✦ A gaming controller. Most action games need this, because a touchpad just isn’t sufficient when it comes to saving the world from demons. ✦ A large, fast, hard drive. Modern games can occupy tens of gigabytes of storage space, so you need the room. And they go back to the hard drive regularly to load more scenes and characters, so you want a drive with a fast transfer speed. Today’s fastest hard drives spin faster (7,200 or 10,000 rpm) and use advanced protocols like serial ATA (SATA) to move data. On the horizon (and in a few early systems already) are solid-state “drives” that store information in non-moving flash memory; they’re not quite as fast as a hard drive in certain circumstances but they hold promise for the future. ✦ A speedy, fat pipe of a network. You can enjoy many modern games as multiplayer contests with participants all over the world. Another class of games resides on a central server, with players signing on to look in and join from wherever they are. And finally, many games offer regular updates delivered to players over the Internet. In each of these cases, you need a fast broadband connection like those delivered by a cable modem, DSL modem, or fiber-optic system. An old-fashioned, dial-up telephone connection just won’t cut the mustard . . . or stop that death ray. 28 140925-bk05ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:49 PM Page 397 Stuffing a Wild Laptop 398 ✦ A large, colorful, and quick-reacting high-resolution display. The high end of the laptop market offers LCDs that are taller and wider with each generation. (At the same time, the serious road warrior continues to look for smaller and lighter machines; after a week on the road, every ounce of plastic and silicone feels like it weighs two pounds.) But, again, you can plug an external big-screen LCD or monitor into your laptop; heck, you can even attach your laptop to a big-screen HDTV or projection TV. ✦ An appropriate cooling system. All of this power — the fast processor, the large memory block, the extra graphics and audio cards, the fast- spinning hard disk — generates a great deal of heat within the laptop case. To protect the electronics, the system needs fans, passive heat- transfer devices and other technologies to keep the innards cool . . . or at least not melt-down hot. ✦ Sufficient power. If you run all of the preceding devices (including cool- ing fans) from your laptop’s built-in battery, you can’t expect to run very long without a recharge. Plan on getting a second battery or a source of AC power to run your machine when you sit down to play games. Extreme processors for laptops The first few generations of laptops were basically shrunken versions of desktops: smaller motherboards, tightly packed with components, and space for an off-the-shelf microprocessor. As users began to make a pair of contradictory demands — more speed and longer running time from battery power — engineers had to scramble. The two leading processor makers, Intel and AMD, began introducing versions of their CPUs specifically aimed at laptop designers’ needs, including low power draw and reduced heat production. Among the tricks they employed were processors that adjusted their speed to match the particular task they were performing. And, of course, when it comes to laptops designed for advanced gaming, engineers faced extreme challenges. Running games requires a tremendous amount of horsepower, a huge block of RAM, and a high-performance video and audio subsystem. Intel’s Extreme Edition processors Among Intel’s latest offerings specifically aimed at gaming laptops are chips in the Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme Edition series. As an example, the X7800 is a CPU based on the Merom processor design. Officially rated at a processing speed of 2.6 GHz, the X7800 is delivered unlocked, meaning that designers (and techie users) can overclock the chip to higher speeds. 28 140925-bk05ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:49 PM Page 398 Book V Chapter 4 Gaming with a Laptop Stuffing a Wild Laptop 399 The real restriction on speed of an unlocked processor is the system’s ability to cool off the chip and the laptop’s interior. AMD Turion 64 X2 processors AMD’s equivalent to Intel’s work is the AMD Turion 64 X2 dual-core family, mobile versions of the desktop AMD64 processor line. AMD emphasizes the processor’s ability to work with multiple threads of information simultane- ously; different programs or different elements of the same software can access specialized elements of the two cores of the processor at the same time. The process for manufacturing AMD Turion 64 mobile technology empha- sizes thermally efficient processor operation, enabling reduced power con- sumption during various system performance states and sleep states. And there is an additional C3 Deeper Sleep state to improve performance, reliabil- ity, and security of existing and future virtualization environments. What, you might ask, is a virtualization environment? It’s a current technical buzz- word for systems that make groups of computers, storage devices, or other hardware act as if they were merely one. An extreme gaming laptop If you’ve got the money, someone out there will have the product of your dreams. You may find what you’re looking for at the high end of the line for a major laptop maker — like Dell’s XPS brand or certain models in Toshiba’s Satellite series — or you may need to buy from a specialty computer maker like Alienware. See Figure 4-1. Alienware began as a “boutique” maker of ultra-high-end laptops and desk- tops for gamers. In 2006, the company was purchased by Dell Computer with promises that it would continue to operate on its own, with its own product line and out-of-this-world designs and engineering. Thus far the promise has been kept. One example of one of the most advanced laptops for gaming enthusiasts, as this book goes to press, is the Alienware Area 51 m9750. The system is pow- ered by an Intel Core 2 Duo T7600 processor running at 2.33 GHz with 4MB of cache. The primary differences between an Alienware laptop and a machine meant for the mass market are two: ✦ The machine is capable of including some very advanced components including multiple graphics cards. ✦ You can easily customize the machine before or after purchase. 28 140925-bk05ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:49 PM Page 399 Stuffing a Wild Laptop 400 Courtesy of Alienware I constructed a gaming laptop of my dreams based on available components from Alienware. In addition to the processor, here’s the machine I configured: ✦ Video cards: Dual NVIDIA GeForce 8700M GT adapters, each with 512MB of dedicated video memory. ✦ Memory: 4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SO-DIMM RAM. ✦ Display: 17-inch WideUXGA 1920 x 1200 LCD with Clearview Technology. ✦ Operating system: Windows Vista Home Premium. ✦ Hard drive: 200GB drive running at 7,200 rpm. ✦ Optical drive: 2X Blu-ray writer/DVD±RW burner. ✦ Wireless Network Card: Internal Intel PRO Wireless 3945 a/b/g mini-card. ✦ Sound card: Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio. ✦ Media center: Remote control and ATSC TV tuner. ✦ Mouse: Logitech V450 laser cordless mouse for notebooks. ✦ Game Controller: Alienware Dual Compatible Gaming Pad. ✦ External speakers: Logitech Z-5300e 5.1 280-watt speakers. Figure 4-1: This Alien- ware Area- 51 M17x laptop is fully equipped for gaming purposes, including a glowing alien’s head on the cover. 28 140925-bk05ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:49 PM Page 400 Book V Chapter 4 Gaming with a Laptop Stuffing a Wild Laptop 401 Oh, and it comes in a “stealth black” case that looks like a flattened version of Darth Vader’s helmet and they throw in a free Alienware baseball cap and mousepad. The price for this ultimate toy, in early 2008, was $4,998 . . . more than three times the price for a typical high-end business machine, but this isn’t a typical business machine. At the same time Alienware offers a version of the same machine with a 64GB solid-state drive, a block of flash memory with no moving parts. Figure 4-2 shows the bottom of the Alienware Area-51 M17x. Two graphics adapters are at top left, two RAM module slots are centered, and a pair of hard disk drives are at lower right. The large open compartment at bottom left is ready for insertion of a high-capacity battery. Courtesy of Alienware Figure 4-2: Under the access panels at the bottom of the Alienware Area-51 M17x. 28 140925-bk05ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:49 PM Page 401 Book V: Playing with Multimedia 402 28 140925-bk05ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:49 PM Page 402 Book VI Managing Your Power Supply The Windows Vista Power Options window lets you choose from three laptop power plans. 29 140925-pp06.qxp 4/8/08 12:49 PM Page 403 . games. Extreme processors for laptops The first few generations of laptops were basically shrunken versions of desktops: smaller motherboards, tightly packed with components, and space for an off-the-shelf. pretty perfect specification is for a vehicle that’s for point-to-point commuting and it makes eminent eco- nomic and ecological sense. But then there are people who, for reasons that vary from real. Tricking out a laptop for gaming ߜ Extreme processors and laptops L et us together agree on two very important and quite disconnected facts: ✦ The first computers were designed for very mundane tasks