Modern games need powerful graphics cards, and gaming notebooks have the very best available along with generally monstrous specs.
What are gaming notebooks?
Gaming notebooks are high-end notebooks that put huge focus on the graphics card, processor and RAM in order to run the latest games at the highest settings.
Why would you want a gaming notebook?
If your main reason for wanting a notebook is to play modern games at their highest possible settings, a gaming notebook is the only way to go about it.
Why you would not want a gaming notebook?
You’d be best to avoid a gaming notebook if high-end gaming isn’t of particular importance to you, because the high-end graphics card will massively increase the price and significantly reduce battery life. These are specialist notebooks, and as a result they’re by definition not for everyone.
What are the specs?
The most important part, the graphics card, will be top notch. Two good modern examples are the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 485M and the AMD Radeon HD 6970M, but if you see a gaming notebook with a graphics card that has the prefix Crossfire or SLI then it’s a dual graphics card and most likely extremely powerful.
One nearly constant feature for gaming notebooks is a Full HD screen of between 15.6in to 18.4in in size. They also have either Sandy Bridge Intel Core i7 processors or first generation desktop Intel Core i7s. RAM is going to be plentiful, with 8GB being normal but some gaming notebooks having up to 16GB. Storage varies a lot, and can be a small 500GB hard disk drive all the way up to 1,500GB hard disk drives or even combinations of 120GB solid state drives and 750GB hard disk drives. Blu-ray players or Blu-ray burners sometimes crop up, but more often than not you'll have a DVD burner instead.
Conclusion
These massively powerful specialist notebooks may not be for everyone, but those with deep pockets and a hankering for the best of modern gaming should look no further.
Print