If you follow the link to the Maingear site, the fastest processor they offer is the Core i7 2920XM, which has a stock clock speed of 2.5 GHz. They require that processor in order to overclock it, and while they say they'll overclock it, they don't promise anything about 4.8 GHz. If it has a fully unlocked multiplier, they might be able to push it to near 4 GHz without using any more power than the video card does. Of course, that's because that comparison is to the hottest laptop video card ever. And I mean "hottest" in the bad sense of the word.

They'd have to use a different motherboard from normal, in order to be able to feed more power to the processor. They'd also need a strong cooling system. But if you make the laptop thick and heavy enough and the fans noisy enough, they can more or less keep it adequately cooled.

For some halo products like this, the real point of the product is to get some publicity, from news stories and forum threads like this one. If you hadn't previously thought of Maingear today, then you have now.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It also depends on your budget. For a gaming laptop on a $2000 budget, you should definitely get a Radeon HD 6970M. Ideally, you'd like a Core i7 2720QM, but may need to accept a lower bin Core i7 2630QM for budget reasons. The higher bins above 2720QM are too much more expensive for not enough more performance. It would also be nice to get an SSD instead of a hard drive, but that may be impractical if you need a lot of storage space.

If you need long battery life, then you're really in a bind. Gaming video cards use quite a bit of power at idle, which zaps the battery pretty fast. In a desktop, it's no big deal for a video card to use 10-15 W at idle, but in a laptop, that's a problem. Both AMD and Nvidia have switchable graphics to turn off the video card and use the Intel integrated graphics, but that doesn't seem to get implemented with higher end video cards.

If you want a gaming laptop and also need long battery life in the same laptop, then you should wait to see what AMD's upcoming Llano APU offers. It might be possible to pair a Radeon HD 6970M with the top bin of Llano, and switch between the discrete video card and integrated graphics very smoothly, so that you can power down the video card entirely when it isn't needed for gaming. I'm sure AMD would love to have that sort of switchable graphics; it's really just a question of whether they can. But it should be a lot easier to make it work right when the same driver controls both the integrated graphics and the discrete card than when the discrete card has to decide whether to take over without having the slightest clue what the integrated graphics chip is doing internally.

Hopefully AMD would be able to offer more aggressive CPU clock speeds while turning off the integrated graphics. If the entire APU has a TDP of 45 W, then without the graphics, that should be able to handle four Llano cores at 3 GHz or so. That won't catch a Core i7 2720QM in performance, in spite of the higher clock speed, but it would be in the same ballpark. If a lot of the TDP is reserved for the graphics, so that with the graphics off, the chip can't use more than 25 W, then Llano could be rather bad for higher end gaming laptops.

Sager, Eurocom, and Alienware all sell the hardware that I describe in the first paragraph of this post. Asus and MSI don't yet, so I'm not sure if they're just taking their time, or if they think it will make more sense to pair parts with Llano rather than Sandy Bridge for a higher end gaming laptop. They surely know a lot about Llano performance that we don't.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My recommendation:

Don't get a gaming laptop. Even if you need a laptop and also need a gaming machine, it's often better to buy both a cheap laptop and a gaming desktop than a gaming laptop. In fact, that's what you should do unless the whole point is to have a gaming machine that you can take with you when you travel, and play games on it when you travel.

Not to mention desktops offer more "bang for the buck", don't have the heating issues, MUCH easier to upgrade, etc.

BootySweat, is DreamColor 2 just a screen? If so, why can't I customize my Sager laptop to have that type of screen? I don't see why it would be isolated to only HP computers.

I found http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/228276/maingear_announces_3d_laptop_with_48ghz_processor.html which talks about a 4.8 GHz processor for laptops.

I was looking at what graphics cards are the best/newest for laptops and found http://www.notebookcheck.net/Comparison-of-Laptop-Graphics-Cards.130.0.html. I'm guessing the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 485M SLI is the best graphics card money can buy for gaming laptops. It mentions that you need a big laptop, which is good, since I'm wanting a screen around 20". I could always just buy an external monitor to plug into the laptop. What are your thoughts? http://www.maingear.com/boutique/pc/configurePrd.asp?idproduct=797 is that laptop, which looks like it won't be released until next month in June. Although, I could care less about 3D gaming. I just want top of the line SSD, as much RAM as I can get, and very fast over-clocked processors in my laptop.

Completely wrong.

I have a laptop and I only sit on one place. I have my laptop in my living room--where my TV is. So I get to watch TV AND play Skyrim. Also, what if your house is on fire? Your Skyrim game save is screwed!! Unless you have a laptop.

I think a better way is to ask what causes one person's game to give high frame rate as opposed to another person's game that has super high frame rates? Is it the RAM? The CPU?

Mostly it is a combination of the video card and the display resolution.

a few games are more or less CPU intensive than others, but with a crappy video card you are out of luck regardless of your CPU

So I've been focusing and fretting over the CPU for nothing? I was under the impression that if you had a quad core overclocked to 5 GHz, you'd be able to breeze through every exterior cell in TESIII without any stuttering, clunkiness, or load times between adjacent exterior cells. So you're saying the problem mostly lies within the video card and how good of a monitor you have?

What video card do you have, BootySweat? And how large is your screen(s)?

Have you tried playing Dragon Age 2 on it? My friend says there is a big battle in the beginning that kills his frame rate. I don't know what his specs are but he bought his computer last year at Best Buy or Staples so it's not that old.

wuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut:/facepalm?

Laptops of equal specs are going to be slower and far more expensive than a desktop of equal specs.

1: hardware is downclocked because of massive heat issue's
2: two hardware is for the most part NOT upgradable
3: never buy a laptop for gaming

If you need to BUY a desktop then go with ibuypower/cyberpower pc, honestly though building one is easy.

Q: have you ever played with lego's as a child
IF YES then you are now qualified to build a gaming rig.

Yeah DA2 runs excellent on my laptop at 1920x1080, DX11 mode, high res texture pack, SSAO enabled, High Quality motion blur, 16 x AF, 4 x AA, all other settings completely maxed, except

slows down in

• cut scenes where there is a lot of fire in the background.
  
• exterior areas where there are moving cloud shadows on the ground.

Nice! What does Screen Space Ambient Occlusion do that is different from the ordinary occlusion? (I had to look up SSAO on wikipedia).

And what are AF and AA?

Thorn2002, do you think Sager laptops are becoming much better than Asus laptops?

PC is always better in EVERY respect besides cost. Wanna know why laptops are so cheap? BECAUSE THEY'RE CRAP.