Mobile Computing Buyer’s Guide: Gaming Notebooks

Christmas and New Year holiday season is fast approaching and everyone’s busy preparing all the gifts for their loved ones. For gamers who enjoy the solitaire app, perhaps one of the best presents is a beefy, brand-new gaming notebook, but making the right decision can be difficult because of the many possible choices out there. To help you with this, we have compiled a list of some of the most compelling options in this category. Stay tuned to JagatReview.com for more guides on other notebooks types!

The Gaming Notebook

This kind of notebook is specifically designed as portable gaming machines. As such, they are usually armed with some of the best hardwares available for a mobile system. However, since high-performance components require significantly more space inside the computer, gaming notebooks are big and heavy. This compromises their mobility, but the additional performance is well worth the tradeoff if you don’t plan on carrying one on your back all day long. More affordable alternatives, which are lighter or smaller, are also available.

In this Buyer’s Guide article, our list of gaming notebooks starts from the Rp 4.000.000 (around US$ 440) price category and goes all the way up to “money is no object”. We selected at least one winner for every category. Not one of the notebooks is perfect for everyone though, and cheaper price doesn’t necessarily mean that the corresponding product is of lower quality. Choosing the notebook that suits your situation best is, therefore, the right way to go. Happy shopping!

Gaming Notebooks, Sub- Rp. 5.000.000 (US$ 550) Price Category-

Our Recommendation

ASUS X42JE

Asus X42JE comes with a variety of color options. Beneath its colorful exterior, lies the dual-core Intel Pentium P6100 processor. Sharing the same 32nm fabrication process, this processor is essentially a Core i3 without the Hyper Threading feature. According to our previous tests, the Pentium P6100 is powerful enough to run most applications without any trouble.

The 1 GB RAM is rather small for today’s standard, but this glitch can be solved easily by adding a SO-DIMM memory module or two. Since notebook memories themselves are becoming even more affordable, this is neither too expensive nor too difficult to do. Asus X42JE’s Radeon HD 5470 graphics chip is no high-end performer, but it still provides enough processing power to allow you to play games at low to medium resolutions on the 14 inch screen, albeit with some compromises on the graphics quality part.

What is most interesting from this notebook is its price: Asus X42JE currently retails for Rp 4.700.000 (around US$ 500) without OS. In our opinion, that price point is relatively attractive, given the technical specification the notebook has to offer. There are others that come close in terms to price, but none is as technically advanced as this one.