As my old stationary PC has become outdated i need to buy a new one in a soonish future in order to play QuakeWorld and all the other games out there. I thought i'd check in here if anyone is even using a laptop to play QW and the most recent games aswell.

My main concerns are basically:
* Are they good enough for the new games?
* Are the in-built screens good enough for a game like QW? I noticed there are models coming with 120Hz screens - are they a "safe bet"?
* They seem quite pricy

I've only checked the ASUS G74SX 17.3" Full HD and the 120Hz screen equivalent ASUS G74SX 17.3" Full HD 120Hz 3D so far...

The last few days i've been playing on my work laptop + mouse + keyboard which is quite OK except for the constant tearing i get due to the 60Hz screen i guess. When i change the settings to avoid the tearing it's simply not smooth enough... I guess buying a gaming laptop AND a screen would solve this, but if i can avoid a separate screen it would be very nice.

Any input is appreciated.

I suppose Alienware is the shit nowdays.

MSI GE620/GE620DX is nice. It seems to have really good hardware for the price.

I would buy something with a smaller screen (to ease portability/battery life) and hook it up to a monitor. Laptops are good enough to run QW now but I still wouldn't want to play on a laptop screen, you will pay a massive premium to get 120hz on a laptop and even then it is only 17" so not as good as say 22" for QW. If your current monitor does 120hz+ then you will be able to save money there.

Just don't get a "normal" laptop to play on, it sucks big time which you can see if you spec me 8)

Well i am currently playing on a normal laptop (work laptop actually, hehe) and it works quite ok except for the fact that the screen can't cope with the refresh rate so i get these weird graphical behaviours. It's fairly smooth, but the picture gets distorted sometimes.

I've thought about gaming laptop + separate screen and it's probably the best solution although i'd like the mobility it would give without having to get a separate screen.

I'm also curious to know whether these laptops really cope with the new games. Will i be able to run Diablo 3 with decent FPS for example? It's mandatory for me to go down into hell again once the port opens!

http://www.razerzone.com/blade

I'm absolutely uninformed in current HW trends, but there are two main reasons I'd never buy something like a "gaming" notebook. First, I don't believe you can avoid cooling problems, that just seems impossible to me when you take into account how the hardware is squeezed together in the notebook. Second, the price. It's typically on the level of ~180-200% of the price of equivalent PC.

back in 2009, i took my laptop to qhlan, with a fresh, qw-only, windows install and it ran smoothly (with external monitor ofc).
the pc was a acer centrino 1.6, with dedicated ati videocard

so, every pc works for qw nowadays. if it feels jerky, do dual boot with a fresh windows installation, just for qw.
with a nice external monitor, should be enough for competitive gaming
my 2 cents

I'm buying a mini-itx computer soon, dedicated for the living room telly. It's quite customizable, dependable on your needs. Maybe that is something more suited to your needs?

http://www.mini-itx.com/

I bought this Zotac id41+ to run XBMC and use as a mediacenter, the reason I bought this one, was because it can run qw - so I can spec QTV on the bigscreen

I have an Alienware M11x R1 and been happy with it. I've taken it to Asia a few times. It is small enough to use on a economy size tray table on a flight. Mine runs most modern games yet the current one, the R3, is about twice as fast as my R1. It's great for portability and battery life. I don't really see the point in 17" laptops myself since they typically aren't very portable and their battery life sucks. You can play QW on any laptop with a decent GPU today but like Hangtime said at home I'd still hook it up to a real monitor and keyboard, etc. The M11x despite having a relatively average quality and small screen is something that doesn't really bug me much. I get used to playing on it pretty fast when I'm traveling around. Nothing beats a 24" LCD at home however.

I use MSI GE620DX and it still runs pretty well.