Gaming laptops or laptops bought for gaming are gaining popularity because, despite their cost, they are very portable and allow gamers to get together to compete. We're now talking the ultimate LAN PARTY! The overall hardware performance has improved constantly as well, and now being tied to your desk or lugging your entire desktop over to a friends house is no longer needed to take a part in the action.

You could even say that gaming is driving some of the technology such as dual core processors, graphics cards and video power. Newest features on laptops for gaming include those as well as larger hard drives, increased memory, and batteries with longer life. Now you can even add a mobile broadband card and log in from just about any location in the U.S.

Laptop gamers can assemble their own laptop now to their own specs, and incorporate components that can be easily upgraded later. Many manufactures build strictly for the gamer. One company, Alienware, builds the best gaming laptops money can buy.

We've put together the following guide when shopping for that laptop as a serious gaming systems

VIDEO AND GRAPHICS CARDS

Getting the fastest and most powerful video card is essential. Common video graphic chipsets include ATi' Mobility, NVIDIA, 3D Labs, Matrox, STMicro, Trident S3 and SIS. Many of the top laptops include the ATi Mobility Radeon 9700, which in a laptop provides power with less drain on your battery life. It can handle the heaviest apps including 3-d gaming, video editing and HDTV display. One note however, if you may be thinking about running Linux as your operating system, stick with the NVIDIA chipsets. ATi makes some great video cards, however the best video drivers for Linux can be found with NVIDIA.

Some laptops now come with integrated graphics, meaning that components share processing power. Check the amount of video RAM, or VRAM, available in a laptop with integrated graphics.

Memory

Make sure you buy with the most RAM possible up front, it will save you on upgrade costs later. Ignore the minimum required RAM for your operating system (currently 512MB for Windows XP as of this writing). Minimums are never sufficient for really running game apps full bore.

More RAM will let you run 3-D games and multiple simultaneous apps. You can now find some laptop systems with 2GB of 533 MHz RAM pre installed. In addition, DDR2 SDRAM is now available, and can increase the conventional speeds of SDRAM to 200MHz and up to 400MHzmore. This is important since SDRAM normally maxes at approximately 166MHZ.

VRAM is video RAM, and is additional memory employed by the video drivers on your laptop. Using VRAM gives you the power to play 3-D games. VRAM is not like standard memory, because it permits two devices  to access it simultaneously, allowing screen refresh and data processing for example. VRAM will cost more than SDRAM.

PROCESSOR SPEED

Buy the fastest processor you can afford as well. CPUs are expensive, and your processor choice will drive a large part of the cost of your system, but don't skimp here. Faster processors means your system is better able to handle high-demand gaming including 3-D graphics. The impact of a slow processor on games is that the display will freeze or cause other distortions. Work with your fast RAM to make sure your processor is powerful enough to keep your graphics from freezing up.

Processor speeds are stated in MHz or GHz, and GHz are faster. On the high performance processors, you will see speeds of anywhere from 2.4 to 3.4 GHz. While the fastest processors are not yet available for laptops, you can still find processors approaching these speeds for laptop gaming systems. However it's possible that slower clock speed can still work if you have to cut costs. In the end, the processor speed is what powers your entire laptop, so invest in the fastest processor you can.

HARD DRIVE

IDE drives are most common in laptops and desktops, however these drives use parallel technology which carries your program's data in parallel streams of data bits. A faster technology is the SATA drive, which carries data in a single stream and can provide data transfer of up to thirty times faster than the IDE drives. If you can, choose a SATA drive for your laptop, and of course choose the most storage capacity you can afford. Drives over 100 GB are not uncommon. Hard drives also have speeds measured in RPM, like turntables - go with the highest you can afford, up to 7,200 rpm.

VIDEO DISPLAY

You will of course want to purchase the best quality display you can. Most laptop displays are excellent quality, but be sure the resolution of your display is compatible with your games and can work with 3-D games as well.

Displays are calibrated by the number of pixels or dots that comprise your display. The several kind of display resolution are:

SVGA - 800 x 600 pixels.
XGA - 1024 by 768 pixels
SXGA - 1280 x 1024 pixels
WXGA - same as above, is a widescreen XGA. All XGA models are higher resolution than SVGA models.
TFT Active Matrix Display - TFT means "thin-film transistors". High-quality laptop computers have TFT active matrix LCD screens (liquid crystal displays).

PUT IT ALL TOGETHER

Ultimately, for a high end laptop gaming system, you can easily spend upwards of $3,000. For the serious gamer, putting together the best system possible right up front means more play before upgrades and months or years of top-quality excitement.