If you are a gamer, as most probably you are if you are reading this article, then you know the importance of getting a machine specifically tweaked to your gaming needs. Before the age of gaming notebooks, gamers had only two choices: Customize their own systems to run their favorite games or buy them from small niche vendors. In recent years however, all you have to do is order a gaming notebook or desktop machine and the choices today make it quite affordable. The fact that major players like Toshiba, Dell, Sony, Asus and Gateway have shown significant interest in this and have their own brands aimed at gamers means that significant improvements have been made in this field and you can expect more to come.

One of the highest hardware components you will want to have the best possible performance is the graphics card. If you are making a trade off between the CPU speed and the graphics, I say give your graphics card a 10 to 1 tweaking over your CPU. This feature is so important a gaming notebook that it is now possible to undertake end-user graphics card upgrades to new generation of graphics technology. Do not compromise on your graphics card.

Consider also the LCD resolution of your notebook. A modern gaming notebook will have a SXGA+ 1400×1050 or a WSXGA+ 1680×1050 at the low-end of resolution. The ratio of width to height or the aspect ratio is also an important consideration. More and more laptops are now coming with a widescreen format of 16:10. While not all games support his format, you can expect future game titles to natively support this format. For faster level loading, consider purchasing a gaming notebook with a SATA drive that runs faster than 7,200RPM (Revolutions Per Minute). This allows it to support burst rates of 150MB/Sec. What about memory requirements? Every respectable gaming notebook will have at least 2GB of memory, otherwise expect game stalls.

As I mentioned, field dominating gaming laptops come installed with the best and the fastest graphics cards. A popular choice is the NVIDIA graphics cards. Time and again, these graphics card choices have surpassed other alternatives in performance. For best CPU performances, an Intel Core 2 Duo processor is a decent choice. For serious hard-core gamers, battery life is an important consideration and having a battery with the highest number of cells will come in handy on those long flights. Expect to see more developments in gaming notebooks and in the gaming industry as a whole and upgrade accordingly for best performances.