Read all about it in our full Dell XPS 17 review. Power or portability? Do you plan to mostly play triple-A demanding games at home and on a desk, but have the scope to occasionally move your machine, then a chunkier and more powerful gaming laptop, like the Alienware Area 51m might be best.
But the latest machines can hit Hz, with those on the cutting-edge sporting Hz displays. HIgh refresh-rate displays are great for people who play fast-paced games such as Overwatch or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. But if you mostly plan to plug in an external monitor, then you might be better off saving money by going for a 60Hz Full HD screen. Budget or high-end? For example, if you're pondering which is the best Age of Empires III civilization to start with, you won't need a massively powerful machine for the game.
Gaming only, or work as well? The good thing about gaming laptops is they have plenty of power for professional tasks as well, such as video rendering or CAD work. As they can be an expensive purchase, it might be worth looking at getting a machine that can pull double duties as a gaming and work laptop.
Alex Wawro is a lifelong tech and games enthusiast with more than a decade of experience covering both for outlets like Game Developer, Black Hat, and PC World magazine. He currently serves as a senior editor at Tom's Guide covering all things computing, from laptops and desktops to keyboards and mice. Included in this guide: 1. The best gaming laptop for your needs can be hard to find, and the search used to be an undertaking fraught with compromises: you could get a lightweight laptop with anemic performance or a powerful machine that really pushed the boundaries of what can really be called a laptop.
Specifications Display: inches, x Weight: 3. Reasons to avoid - No webcam - Keyboard has backlighting issues.
Razer Blade Dimensions: Reasons to avoid - Cramped keyboard - Software oddities. Alienware m15 R4. Weight: 5. Reasons to avoid - Fan gets very loud - Short battery life. Razer Blade 15 Advanced. Specifications Display: Insider Reviews. Tech Buying Guides. Trending News. Buying Guides. Best bookshelf speakers for home in India. Best inch lightweight laptops in India. Best smartphones with over 4,mAh battery. Best lightweight gaming laptops Best bookshelf speakers for home in India Best inch lightweight laptops in India Best smartphones with over 4,mAh battery.
We'll move through the state of hardware, the price of PC gaming, how we played, what we played, and the big questions we were asking about our biggest problems at the time.
I can't believe I had to do extensive research about something I lived 10 years ago. Time, man. If you were looking for something to best Crysis, the benchmark for PC gaming graphics from through a chunk of the s, you'd really have to splurge in These prebuilt luxury machines were SLI or Crossfire capable beasts with ridiculous chassis and dumb names and now-laughable specs—it's like everything's changed even though nothing has.
SSDs were fairly new on the scene, too, at least for the PC gaming market, and they were extremely expensive. But what was an average enthusiast buying in ? Most of us just wanted a capable, somewhat future-proof PC, not some state-of-the-art novelty I could build for much cheaper in a year or two. Anandtech's PC buying guide had a more reasonable spec in mind. Here's what the sucker was packing.
Compare it to your own CPU and laugh! I hope you laugh. Please, stop crying. Tom's recommended a quite a few x monitors ah, the slightly-squarer luxury of , though it was more common to play on lower resolutions.
A study by Teoalida claims that x monitors made up the majority of the worldwide market share in , with resolutions as reigning res champs—my own monitor was a x screen that I'd used for years at that point, so I feel it. The new decade marked the early days of the x standard, established by the TV industry's adoption of the aspect ratio and ensuing HDTV resolutions, p and p.
The reigning popularity of console games used HDTV-capable resolutions as a big selling point, so most games were designed to hit the same benchmarks. The big ticket price was worth it for longtime builders, though, with boot and game loading speeds seeing a huge jump. I bought an SSD around and still remember the boot time blowing my ass off.
They quickly became one of the most vital PC upgrades. Time's arrow. The winner didn't matter much to PC gamers though, since disc drives shortly became unnecessary. Digital distribution for all types of media, better internet, and cheaper and faster storage left disc drives to the seriously stubborn, though with strict data caps from some ISPs and the saturation and acceptance of online-authentication DRM via launchers, I don't blame anyone for holding on tight. As all old tech does: like garbage!
The best chassis were simple black boxes, though the chunky Gamer Aesthetic was still doing its thing, adding angles and curves and garish colors where they didn't belong. LED lighting was a bit more of a luxury, though simpler mono-color lights were fairly common, especially around case buttons. Nothing from was much more offensive than the gross cases you see around these days, though things were a bit more ubiquitously obelisk adjacent.
Dust was created to collect on these suckers. At stores—how quaint—but not as often. After the release of The Orange Box in '07, Steam was my primary destination, and it was becoming the place to buy games for more PC gamers year after year.
Sales, baby. Steam Sales were a different beast back then. Games didn't just get steady, flat discounts. Limited-time sales reduced games by up to percent. Steam sales were a revelation for kids like me, who had next to nothing to spare on games. Although folks like Stardock tried , no other company had the infrastructure, library, renown, and wild pricing to take Steam on, and so it became embedded into PC gaming culture in the west.
A few familiar names were picking up speed, though. Cheap bundles full of great games accelerated the growth of Steam libraries and renown among participating indie devs.
According to SteamSpy , games came out on Steam in In , Steam farted out that many games every two weeks with games released this year so far.
Steam was itty-bitty, even if it felt huge. The peak concurrent users on Dec 26 was 2,, Today, Steam often peaks around 16 million concurrent users. That's around seven times the peak. Steam was the big one, though Stardock Ashes of the Singularity, Galactic Civilizations had a go with their own launcher Impulse , which arrived in June A lack of feature parity with Steam and the sneaky insertion of Stardock's desktop organizer Fences into the Impulse installer didn't help it win over the masses.
GameStop bought out and rebranded the app in , shuttering it a few years later. The next launcher to arrive would be Uplay's primordial form in early I'll never forget the first time a launcher launched a launcher.
So, in there was roughly one major launcher. Compare that today's plus. Games for Windows Live made our lives miserable, though it wasn't exactly a launcher, more of an arbitrary overlay and DRM hybrid that forced you into the Xbox Live ecosystem.
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