GAMER PC PC : DISCUSSION

My Dream Laptop
Posted in Gamer PC | October 30, 2008 8am

Long ago I failed to understand the point of gaming notebooks. They never seemed fast enough to run the games I cared to play and I always had a decent desktop that I could either build real quick or use whenever the need for gaming arose. In the past few years however I’ve come to really appreciate them, mainly because of their portability and ease of setup.Whenever I’d have an impromptu LAN party at my house the first several hours were always spent scrounging up hardware, installing Windows, configuring systems and dealing with silly problems that never cropped up before that night. I never had the space or spare hardware to leave gaming machines ready, and if I did have a system setup I’d eventually just start using it for testing as soon as our LAN party was over. My friends weren’t the biggest fan of this. Systems that were ready a day before were now running SYSMark.And here’s where gaming notebooks really came into play. Mobile GPUs have gotten powerful enough that it’s possible to play games that are a generation old, quite well. You can even play the latest titles if you’ve got enough GPU horsepower or turn down the settings a bit.Mobile CPUs are also easily comparable to desktop counterparts, so you’re not giving up anything in that department. And with the advent of SSDs you can actually equalize disk performance between your notebook and desktop as well.So when ASUS asked me what I’d like to see in a gaming notebook, without limits, I got a bit excited.Upgradability is terribly important with gaming notebooks; mobile GPUs can quickly get out of date, especially with major PC game titles coming out every 12 – 24 months it’s real easy for your gaming notebook to be lacking in the umph department. The problem with GPU upgradability in notebooks is that the thermals for these things are rarely designed to be forward looking enough to accommodate any GPU, but hey this is my dreamworld so I want a gaming notebook that can accept at least one to two generations of GPU upgrades. CPU upgrades are a necessity but we’ve got those already, so I don’t need to ask for too much here.Display panel technology is particularly important, I’d like to see an IPS or PVA panel used in the notebook, preferably with a 1920×1200 display resolution. The TN panels that are oh-so-common on notebooks can be nice, but I’d prefer something a bit better for my dream gaming notebook.Stylistically I’d point no further to the latest MacBook and MacBook Pro from Apple, they’ve got the best build quality out of any notebook I’ve used and look great. Just because this is a functional device doesn’t mean that it can’t be pretty too.Given that gaming notebooks are generally large I’d like to see two 2.5” drives used here, a SSD boot drive using Intel’s X25-M for applications and main game installs, as well as a large (500GBperhaps?) mechanical disk drive for game images, backups and all other data.The final request would simply be for a healthy set of I/O ports. I’d like to see DVI or DisplayPort out standard for connecting to a larger monitor. I hate to mention Apple again in such a gaming focused discussion, but I believe it may have hit on something important with its latest 24” display. Apple includes a power connector for the MacBook/MacBook Pro on its 24” display, making it easy to keep your notebook charged and connected to an external display without using your cumbersome power brick (speaking of which, a more svelte power brick would be nice too). To get such a thing for our dream gaming notebook would obviously require some standardization and work between both the notebook makers and the display vendors, something Apple doesn’t have to worry about given its control of the entire platform, but a particularly optimistic PC OEM could easily deliver something similar.There are my thoughts – how about yours? Did I leave anything out? What would you like to see on your ideal gaming notebook?

GAMER PC PC : DISCUSSION

Notebook vs Desktop
Posted in Gamer PC | November 5, 2008 10am

Several years ago Intel made a prediction: that notebooks would become more important than desktops, thus justifying the birth of the Centrino platform.  Believing in such a thing back then was silly, notebooks were far inferior to desktops in every aspect.  Their displays were horrible, portability wasn’t that great, performance was poor and they were hardly flexible.As time went on, the gap between notebook and desktop performance began to shrink.  Intel first addressed it with CPUs, building the Centrino platform and eventually all of its desktop CPUs off of the same basic architecture that it used in its mobile cores.  These days you can get nearly top binned processor frequencies in a notebook just as easily as you can in a desktop.As Intel made headway in the CPU space, ATI and NVIDIA pushed further with mobile GPUs.  Quite possibly the biggest gap continues to exist between desktop and mobile GPU performance but given the right form factor, you can actually play modern games on a notebook without giving up too much.  And if you’re playing titles that are a generation or two old, a reasonable mobile GPU is well suited for the job.LCDs also improved in quality and technology, today’s LED backlit panels offer good viewing angles, fast response times and a slim enough profile to be used in some very stylish implementations.The final separation between desktop and notebook performance was always the disk drive and as of the past year or so, we’ve seen that divide narrow.  Solid State Drives are small enough to fit in a 2.5”  drive bay and offer the same performance as you’d get in a larger machine; Intel’s 2.5” SSD is easily as fast if not faster than the best 3.5” HDDs you get in a desktop PC, and with the advent of the SSD the final bricks of separation between notebook and desktop performance came crumbling down.Going forward I expect to see the difference between a desktop and a notebook diminish.  Apple touched on something very interesting with its new LED Cinema Display; the monitor has a built in power adapter for Apple’s notebooks.  As the line between the notebook and desktop gets blurrier I’d expect to see more situations like this, where your desktop is simply defined by the monitor you plug your notebook into when you’re at your desk.  It’s also possible using PCI Express cabling, to have your GPUs stored outside of your machine, perhaps in the base of your monitor, to improve gaming performance while docked in desktop mode.The possibilities are limitless but I suspect that this notebook vs. desktop debate will fade away and a new discussion will form over the next few years.  At that point we’ll be debating MID (Mobile Internet Device) or PC...

GAMER PC PC : DISCUSSION

What PC Games are you Waiting For?
Posted in Gamer PC | June 9, 2009 6am

I was reading an interview with Epic’s Tim Sweeney the other day and Tim brought up a very interesting point:“That's a tricky case though, because we could do vastly more than we're currently doing if we focused on supporting dual high-end video cards, which have about 10 times the graphics horsepower of a console today.” - Tim SweeneyTake a high end gaming PC with two GPUs and you’ve got 10x the graphics power of an Xbox 360.  That’s pretty ridiculous.  With only a single GPU we’re talking 5x the graphics power.  Yet today’s games are designed for the least common denominator.  With Microsoft and Sony trying to extend console life spans into 2011 and beyond it kills me to see a serious lack of pushing-the-envelope games on the PC.  Honestly, BioShock 2 is probably going to be the biggest title for me on the PC this year.  Everything else is either a console exclusive or won’t hit the PC until sometime after a console release.  With 5 - 10x more graphics horsepower on high end gaming PCs today and even more by the end of this year, I’m hoping that eventually the performance gap will tempt more developers over to PCs once more.

What about all of you - what PC games are you looking forward to this year? 

GAMER PC PC : DISCUSSION

Q4, 2009 or Q1, 2010: When you Should Buy your Next Notebook
Posted in Gamer PC | May 12, 2009 7am

It’s codenamed Arrandale and if you’re looking for a reason to upgrade your notebook, I believe this may just be that reason.

Intel’s Arrandale processor is a member of the Westmere family.  None of these code names really matter because they’ll be gone by the time the product ships.  All you need to know is that Arrandale will be the 32nm mobile version of Intel’s Core i7.  It may get called something else (Core i5 perhaps?), but it’s the lineage that counts folks.
Arrandale is a dual core chip with Hyper Threading, meaning it can work on four threads at once.  If the impact of HT on Core i7 is any indication, we should see some serious performance gains simply due to HT on its dual core brethren.
Intel launched i7 at the very high end and the technology will trickle down over time.  Thanks to its high end nature, the chips all drew high wattages. Despite that fact, the Core i7 was particularly power efficient.  At the same TDP as its Core 2 predecessor, the Core i7 will generally draw less power while offering the same performance, or offer better performance per watt.  While this is a nice feature to have on a high end desktop, it’s absolutely necessary on a notebook.
My guess for performance?  I believe, depending on the app, you’ll see similar improvements to what we saw on the desktop with i7.  That is 0 - 30% at the same clock speed compared to an existing Core 2 notebook.Battery life should improve as well thanks to Arrandale’s superior power efficiency.
All of these are safe bets but there’s just one more thing.  Arrandale ships with a 45nm graphics core on the same package as the CPU.  It’s not going to be anything earth shattering in terms of gaming performance (albeit better than existing Intel graphics), but power consumption should be quite good.
Arrandale is due out in the last three months of 2009, but OEMs may not have notebooks until the start of 2010 (hence the range in the title).  I’m betting the wait will be worth it.