Holiday Buyer's Guide: Notebooks

Best Gaming Notebook: ASUS G73Jh/G73Jw ($1635/$1700)

The ASUS G73 comes in two flavors: the G73Jw and the G73Jh. Either one of these is awesome. Let us explain.

Prior to the G73, ASUS' gaming notebooks were potent but noisy, hot, and gaudy as hell. With the stealth-inspired G73 design, drastically improved airflow, and near ban on glossy plastic, ASUS was able to address the overwhelming majority of complaints about their previous units while firing a bullet straight into the heart of the gaming notebook market with an irresistable pricetag: buy a G73Jh from Best Buy, and you can walk home with one of the fastest mobile GPUs on the market for just $1,199: the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870. That model comes with only one HDD, 6GB RAM, and a 900p LCD, so if you can spare the extra $400 the various upgrades sweeten the deal, but either way you're getting a potent gaming laptop for an amazing price.

The design of the G73 fires on all cylinders and produces one of the best deals on the market, so it makes sense that when ASUS went to refresh it, all they really did was pull the Radeon HD 5870 for the generally comparable NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M and bump the Intel Core i7-720QM to a 740QM. All things considered we'd probably still go for the 5870-equipped G73Jh, but we have a hard time believing any gaming enthusiast would be disappointed with either model. You can find the no-frills G73Jw starting at $1400 online.

Gaming Runner Up: Clevo X7200 (Starting at $3113 with 480M SLI)

If you're not on a budget on the other hand or just have a general distaste for money that isn't on fire, we present to you the Clevo X7200, the most insane, ridiculous notebook you can conceivably buy. Oh we can review machines like the X7200, but realistically they're critic-proof. Why?

Well, what other notebook can pack a hex-core desktop Core i7, three hard drive bays, and a pair of GeForce GTX 480Ms in SLI? Oh, and you can RAID the drives in the system, too. The X7200 weighs more than my cat, boasts a 1080p screen, and somehow still manages to sport that same godawful Clevo keyboard. Even the power brick is appropriately enormous.

As a result, if money is no object and you simply must have as much notebook as humanly possible, there's really no choice: the Clevo X7200 represents the top of the mountain. We would be remiss in not mentioning AVADirect having offered us the review unit, so if you're going to take the plunge and buy a notebook that doubles as a murder weapon and space heater, you couldn't choose a better vendor to get it from.

Gaming Notebook Alternatives

There really aren't that many gaming notebooks out there when you combine all the model renaming. Clevo makes barebones notebooks that are then used by a large number of boutique shops and the like (AVADirect, Eurocom, Sager, and others all use the same basic Clevo designs, though some are more forthcoming about this fact than others), but a rose by any other name would smell as sweet... and weigh as much.

The Clevo W880CU drops to a single GTX 480M GPU with a mobile CPU but checks in with a starting price of nearly $2000 at AVADirect. Perhaps more interesting is the updated W860CU, now with GTX 460M or GTX 470M and quad-core CPUs starting at $1500. The Clevo W870CU has the same chassis as the W880CU but with a smaller power brick and again the 460M or 470M GPU starting at around $1530. We listed AVADirect on all of those links for the simple fact that they're the cheapest place we've found for configuring a Clevo-based notebook, but feel free to shop around at other vendors like Sager and XoticPC.

What about non-Clevo designs? Alienware still has their M-series notebooks, including the M11x R2 that is arguably the smallest laptop to boast reasonable gaming performance, but all three models (M11x, M15x, and M17x) are due for an update. If you want 5870 CrossFire, the M17x is probably the best place to get it, but GeForce parts are all last-generation DX10 for now, and the 400M updates can't be far away. ASUS also has their smaller G53Jw, with similar specs to the G73 but only a single HDD and priced at $1450. Finally, there's MSI notebooks. We really took issue with the GX640's keyboard, but it looks like the GX660 might have fixed this. $1200 for i5-450M and HD 5870 is still a good deal, or there's the larger GX740 starting at $1100 with the same components (and a 1680x1050 display as well!)

For less expensive "gaming" options, we refer back to the alternatives listed at the end of the Mainstream section on the previous page.