Cheap Gaming Laptops
Depending on every persons personal income, people have different opinions on what “cheap” really means. While some may find a $1000 dress very expensive, other may thinks it’s a cheap piece of clothing and they will buy it. As for electronics and gadgets, things are pretty much the same. While for some people a cheap gaming laptop means it has to be under $1500, true games will pay even $3000 for a good gaming laptop as they believe it is a small price to pay to satisfy their gaming needs. It also depends on the types of games you want to play. Monopoly and Sim City will have fewer requirements that Jericho or Call of Duty.
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The Asus X83VB-X1 is a really cheap machine which is available at a starting price of $500. Out of all the gaming laptops you could find under $1000, this is probably one of the best choices you could make. It is cheap and the specs are quite ok. The unit reviewed in this article will cost $850 which is still a small price to pay compared to the regular prices of a gaming laptop. We loved the combination of gold and black of the chassis, it give you the impression that the laptop is much more expensive. The processor is an Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 which operates at a speed of 2.0 GHz. You have 4 GB of RAM which means you will probably get your system with Windows Vista preinstalled but you should have no trouble running Windows 7 just as well. If 250 GB of available disk space is not enough, the DVD burner will come in handy to make copies of your files and store them on DVDs. This 14 inch laptop has an nVidia GeForce 9300M GS graphics card with 512 MB of dedicated memory which is a pretty big deal for such a cheap laptop. You will have no trouble playing old games on this laptop but new games must be played at a modest resolution. The keyboard is a little stiff and so are the left and right mouse buttons but you’ll get used to it in a while and besides, if you are going to use this laptop for serious gaming, we recommend you buy a mouse.
The glossy black lid may not be so attractive if you think about its capacity to attract fingerprints but the golden pattern and the Asus logo written in golden letters make it appealing to the eye. It’s certainly not something you see in a laptop every day. The palm rests are also golden while the keyboard is black. Even if the chassis is made out of plastic, it is still very solid so durability is not an issue to be concerned about. The keys are strange because the letters are golden and in dim light they may be difficult to recognize. Above the keyboard you will find 5 buttons which are not for different multimedia functions like we usually find in laptops. Instead they have other features like screen and wireless settings or power management options. The weird thing is that you have a special button to turn the Bluetooth on an off even if the laptop does not have an integrated Bluetooth. This reminded me of the Toshiba Satellite L300-1AL which has no Bluetooth even if there is a “Bluetooth” sticker on the box of the laptop. The touchpad is ok, mainly because it’s bigger than most 14 inch laptop touchpads. The tough part comes with the left and right mouse buttons. It may seem like you need a pickaxe to press them because they are very stiff but hopefully they will loosen up after a while of usage.
There are two hinges that keep the display firmly in place. Even the screen looks a bit glossy, the images are sharp and clear and there are no heavy reflections that may be annoying or that may prevent you from actually seeing what is on the display. The speakers are ok and they produce quality sound considering the size of the laptop (and the size of the speakers as well). The laptop runs quietly considering there is a total of 4 vents that keep this laptop cool (three are located on the bottom side and another large vent on the right edge). One very pleasant surprise was the huge number of ports and connections available on this laptop. You have no less than 5 USB ports (my 15.4 inch laptop has only 3), a FireWire port, a multiformat card reader, an ExpressCard slot, HDMI and VGA out, the usual Ethernet port, stereo speakers, headphones and microphone jack. The 5 USB ports are places on three sides of the laptop as follows: two of them are in the back, another two on the right side and the last one is on the left side. The HDMI and Ethernet ports are located on the back edge of the laptop and the battery is placed in front, under the right corner instead of the usual bottom-back place.
As for the gaming part, the graphics card will do a pretty good job keeping you satisfied considering the low price of the machine. The performance is much better than that of any similarly priced laptop available on the market. You can play some new games with medium settings. You won’t get exactly the ultimate quality experience but it will do if you are looking for a budget gaming laptop. The laptop comes with a 6-cell battery which will only deliver 2 hours and 35 minutes of intense video playback.
Since this type of battery drain test is pretty harsh, we imagine that the battery should last about 3 hours and 30 minutes if you use it for regular tasks like surfing the internet and editing documents. The laptop which come closest to this one is the Dell Studio 1535-143B but compared to the Asus X83VB-X1 it has a weaker graphic card (it uses Intel GMA X3100) and this fact ranks the Dell under the Asus in our cheap gaming laptop top.
