Finding a reasonable gaming laptop without spending a ton of money can be difficult; finding one with DX11 support and high quality components for $1100? That's just being greedy, isn't it? And yet that's exactly what MSI's GX640 brings to the table. Sporting AMD's Mobility Radeon HD 5850, it's a slight step down in performance from the HD 5870, but it's also several hundred dollars cheaper. The GX640 isn't without a few blemishes, but overall this is a very feature rich laptop for a great price.

Who makes the fastest mobile GPUs right now? That question can be a bit tricky to answer, since getting identical laptops other than the GPU is difficult at best. Thankfully, AVADirect was good enough to send us a couple Clevo W860CU notebooks that are indeed identical, outside of the GPU. One sports AMD's top-of-the-line Mobility Radeon HD 5870 while the other is graced with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 285M. Which one is the better option? That's what we aim to determine with this head-to-head duel.

Today NVIDIA announced their latest mobile GPU, the GTX 480M. Based on the GF100 (Fermi) architecture, this will be a fully featured mobile counterpart rather than the "outdated" architectures we've seen with previous mobile GPUs (i.e. GTX 280M vs. GTX 280). Perhaps most shocking of all is that the GeForce GTX 480M should start appearing in notebooks next month, and we'll see SLI configurations at some point as well. NVIDIA has partnered with Clevo for this launch, and they're looking to give notebook gaming the biggest performance increase we've seen in a long time.

ASUS has made it a goal to increase their retail presence in the mobile market. With their successful Eee PC and UL series, they cover the netbook and entry-level markets. At the high-end, things get a bit more fractured. Do you want a multimedia laptop with Blu-ray support and reasonable battery life, or are you more interested in a high performance gaming notebook? The G-series has generally catered towards the latter, and with the G73Jh ASUS now has one of the fastest notebooks around.

Performance is all well and good, but there are a few big [cough] problems with gaming notebooks. The obvious ones are size, weight, and battery life. The more performance oriented the parts in a laptop become, the less likely you are to get a lightweight chassis or good battery life. The G73Jh does nothing for users interested in addressing the size concerns—we'd suggest looking at the Alienware M11x as a viable small gaming laptop. The other issue with gaming laptops frequently comes down to the almighty bottom line. We've seen some good attempts at keeping prices reasonable, including the ASUS G51Vx. The G73Jh does cost a bit more than other gaming laptops, but take a look at the spec sheet and suddenly $1500-$1600 doesn't seem so bad.

You get an i7-720QM CPU, HD 5870 GPU, 8GB of DDR3-1333 memory, a full terabyte of storage (via two 500GB 7200RPM HDDs), and a 1080p LCD. Speaking of which, did we mention that finally we have a laptop with great specifications where the LCD doesn't suck? Sure, it's still a glossy LCD (not like you're going to be using it outside much), but the 1000:1 contrast ratio is a feast for the eyes. If you've been on the lookout for an affordable gaming laptop that doesn't cut corners, the G73Jh is now in the pole position.

In recent years, Acer has been doing an admirable job of condensing respectable hardware into affordable machines. Each successive generation, Acer has usually had one or two solid notebooks that were able to squeeze a decent gaming GPU into a reasonable price tag, and with the Aspire 5740-6979, that trend continues. Today we're able to take a look at a machine that features Intel's still relatively young Core i5 paired with – and this is the particularly compelling part – AMD's new mobile DirectX 11-class hardware.

So just how good of a bargain is the latest Aspire 5740G? If you're after a budget-priced gaming laptop, you'll be hard pressed to beat it. The Mobility HD 5650 is the mobile equivalent of the desktop HD 5570, with slightly lower clocks on the core and memory. We weren't particularly impressed with the desktop offering, but moving to the laptop world and running at 1366x768 makes the GPU far more attractive. For under $800, the Aspire 5740G is able to run every game we tested at medium or higher detail settings, which is more than we can say for the competition.