If you bought a laptop today – and I’m talking even a slim, little Sleekbook…not some game-crusher like the Pavilion dv7 – you’d have an overall better experience than some console collecting dust in your home entertainment center and I dare you to convince me otherwise.
Matt Ployhar, a good dude I know over at Intel (NOT his official title), can back me up. He recently chronicled a trip where he fired up an HP Pavilion dv6 with 3rd Gen Core integrated graphics –HD 3000. In this story, (“How do you Skyrim? Get the most bang for your gaming buck!”) he goes into detail about what I wind up doing often.
1) Play the game at home in the office. Maybe plug it into a bigger monitor
2) On the road, at the airport
3) Skyrim at 30,000 feet? Yes, please.
4) Via HDMI cable at the hotel, he’s on the big screen. (I’d probably just plug in a wired Xbox 360 controller for good measure)
Or there’s the case of Phil Hughes from AMD. (Yep, the guy who recently helped break down what AMD Trinity was all about on the blog.) He’s on his vacation and what’s his son doing while they motor down the highway? With an AMD-flavor of said Pavilion dv6, his kid (pictured at the top of the story) is building out spots in Minecraft. Of course, his machine is rocking an A8 processor.
You know, it’s funny. I remember when “Integrated graphics” was a dirty word. It’s great to see we’re at a point now that you can get some SOLID fidelity out of an affordable laptop. For instance, I’m happy to show you an ENVY 6 Sleekbook in action.
Slim laptops just didn’t have that kind of juice a few years back!
When you really apply the horsepower in a Pavilion dv7, it’s obviously easy to spot the difference between a console and PC. I went to my buddy’s house a couple months back with a 1.5-year-old ENVY 14 laptop and it ran Battlefield 3 on the demo TV better than it did on the Xbox 360 in his living room.
Of course, there’s always the argument that there is a WHOLE lot more that I can do with my laptop than most people can pull off with an Xbox 360 or PS3. May I direct you to just about every other article posted on TheNextBench?
Here’s one last thing to chew on: Whether you’re trying to entertain kids – or yourself – on the road, isn’t it nice to know that you can use something that basically supplants your entire home entertainment center…and you can still get your work done on it? (I threw in that last part to justify the purchase to your significant other….)
Granted, I'm a little biased based upon where I work. Still...How about you guys? What do you think? Am I crazy? We’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject. Better yet, if you’ve used your laptop in some odd places on the road, we want to see where you’ve set up so you could sneak in some gametime.
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