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Can netbooks be less lame right now?
Posted by niero gonzalez in Gamer PC | Apr. 20, 2009 8:00 AM
Netbooks are the silent handshakes of the cool people word processing club, and I’m bitter about electively being shunned. When I’m blogging I can feign membership momentarily, but guys like me can’t ever be true members of this imaginary hipster organization because my geeky needs always pull me away. I have one, and if I’m home I’ll use it for fifteen minutes before I run back crying to my beefy laptop to game or fire up Photoshop. Oh, how I would love to dump you, you fat multi-cored bastard! All jokes aside, my real options are limited and far from hip. The price between an awesome gaming notebook and a lame-but-viable one are significant, but their weight and size of the damn things are similar. Yet, these anvils are necessary. We need the juice.
For us small is measured in tiny gains, which is a shame because “uber small” was the new hotness, and PC’s have done that. I say a possible heir to the throne of the new hotness is “scalable smallness”, as evidenced by the popularity of docking ideas in our community leaderboard – they beat dual-screen and multi-screen by 25%. Geeks with jobs or casual activities (and Warcraft players that game like it’s their job) that demand high powered computers need to make pretend like they’re not overhearing this whole netbook conversation. I feel that most gamers are burdened by their PCs but aren’t quite comfortable with the power of tiny notebook offerings, at least not yet.
So what’s the missing link? I believe there’s an opportunity for WePC, Intel, and Asus to fill that gap somehow by dreaming up the next tiny form factor that gives Netbooks more viability. I’m seeking a holy grail – the marriage between small and mighty is far more likely to happen here than wishing for an iPhone to have an HDMI port and run Vista (ha!). I was poking around the gadget sites and was stunned when I found this little guy:
I am (cautiously) digging what Nvidia is attempting with their ION platform. I’ve yet to see it in action, but the promise is an ultra-compact high-powered desktop that’s technically smaller than a netbook PC but lacks a display and all portability. It’s cute. It’s completely silent. It gives the Intel Atom processor the UMPH it lacks in Netbooks. These systems can output to HDMI and theoretically has enough to juice to play games. What’s there not to like? Well, you can’t really upgrade the thing and it’s not terribly practical, but for a few hundred bucks you really can’t beat this. The reference design also has a million outputs in the front and back with everything you could ever want – SATA, Optical, HDMI, DVI, VGA, Ethernet, Firewire, 5.1 sound, and solid state memory inside. In my eye that’s a wimpy cheap gaming/multimedia computer done right.
Alright, I’m being too coy. Ahem:
CAN WE SHOVE THIS INTO A NETBOOK SO THEY CAN COLLECTIVELY SUCK LESS?
What do you think?
Hi this is Moshe
Pleas look at my post.
Comments will be appreciated.
http://www.wepc.com/vote/view/dream/7362/William_Gibson_Cyberspace_Machine
I've already bought a Netbook and I'm kind of annoyed that it can't game to be honest. I don't expect it to run Crysis or anything, but being able to run Left 4 Dead, even with graphical tweaking would be nice. :) I love my Aspire One, but World of Goo only keeps me going for so long.
Please either shove it into a notebook or some other small space... I'd buy it either way. ;)
I have a laptop for school and some gaming, but it can't even handle some of the newer games. It would be awesome if there was a way to mix the netbook's size with viable gaming options, but I'm still wary -- I'll believe it when I see it.
Try. I'm cautiously enthusiastic on this point.
I already bought a netbook to game. I have an EEEPC 900ha model, its 9 inches and fits in my purse, and it can (and does) run several games. I recently installed GTA: Vice city on it. before that I had Fallout 1 & 2, Baldur's Gate Trilogy (a mod of BG2 that includes the original game attached seamlessly to the sequel and its expansion) and regularly played Diablo 2 and Starcraft (using a wireless mouse.) it can't run some of the fancier more recent games, but it holds its own for older games (which is kind of all I play on pc anymore anyway.)
if they made a fancier platform for portable gaming, I'd definitely consider buying it, provided one caveat: I want to be able to use a plug-in numpad. I use the numpad for my custom binds on my desktop pc, but on the eee, when I plug in an external USB numpad, it disables a block of keys in the middle of the keyboard (which function as the numpad when Fn and numlock are pressed, or when a usb numpad gets plugged in, and tells the keyboard that numlock was pressed...)
I would absolutely love this - having to lug around my 17" laptop for gaming is ridiculous. This would also be amazing for emulators and such, but shhhh!
(also, you are more handsome than Mario Lopez - the cad.)
If they did, I'd certainly be interested; it'd be like a PC handheld. I think it'd be a great idea.
If you did this, I'd be all over it like fat kids on cake.
The nVidia ION looks like the solution to me. I don't need a netbook that can play new games at amazing resolutions. I need a netbook that I can comfortabley play recent games on with no troubles. A casual bit of TF2 during my lunch break at work? Absolutely. With the great range of cheap casual games available on Steam, a netbook with good performance has the spec and versatility to match my DS.
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