cpugeek13: Does anyone have an opinion on the sony? I know the video card isn't quite as good as the asus, but its not bad either. Also, it has 6 gigs of ram, which is more than the other laptops i've been looking at.
The amount of memory (beyond 2GB) is competely irrelevant to gaming performance. The video card itself is the bottleneck.
In addition, for gaming, do NOT buy a laptop with a video card poorer than Nvidia GeForce GT240M / Mobility Radeon HD 4650. Those two are based on, respectively, the desktop GeForce 9800 / Radeon HD 4650 series, and will run all games with high settings levels.
Processor is less important for gaming alone, but more important if you do other work / heavy multitasking. In those cases, a low-clocked Core 2 Duo can start to struggle (the G60VX only has a 2.13 GHz Core 2 Duo processor). If you want a better processor, do not blow money on highly clocked Core 2 Duos, instead go for the new Core i7 processors. While it has a low "base" clock speed of 1.6 GHz (in the 720QM version), it responds by clocking itself up according to how it is being used. It is also quad-core, with hyperthreading meaning that you "virtually" have 8 processor cores available (two threads can execute on the same core at the same time, or at least very nearly). It can operate as a quad 1.6 GHz, a duo 2.4 GHz, or a solo 2.8 GHz, or in-between, clocking itself up as it goes. So, for older games which utilize only one processor core, you effectively have a 2.8 GHz processor which is more than enough.
The machine I have (ASUS X62J it was called here, might be different code elsewhere, but it is part of the M60 series) has the following specs;
- Core i7-720QM (Quad 1.6 GHz w/ multithreading and turbo-boost)
- Nvidia GeForce 240M 1GB DDR3
- 4 GB DDR3 RAM
- 2x500 GB 5300 RPM hard drives
- Win7 Home Premium 64bit
- All the other normal stuff (integrated webcam, bluetooth, networking, card reader, hdmi-port, etc. etc.)
I can testify to it's performance and stability in all games I have tested. It runs Crysis, the ultimate benchmark, on high settings fluently. And it costs less than the G60VX, offering better performance for other tasks than gaming.