[Axial]

Hi,

How about that GTX 285? It's got plenty of performance for IL-2, right? The main reason I prefer NVIDIA is the aftermarket and freeware support. I know that ATI stuff is on the increase, lately, too.

My goal is to find a laptop case maker and build one myself to make it veeeery affordable. I am thinking about an external monitor for home use and an external liquid radiator connected with tubing to allow enough room for internals and yet allow overclocking...

Nice comments by you, but what do you think of these apples??

Thanks! 8)

I wish you could build laptop rigs like you are suggesting, but the market isn't ready for that yet. It's slowly moving in that direction, but as of now we're only half-way there. What you can do, however, is find a boutique store that sells custom laptops from OEMs like Clevo, Compal, MSI, and ASUS. They give you a list of internals that are supported by the model and you can choose out of that list. Alternatively, you can buy a barebones laptop chassis from a company like OCZ that gives you the case, motherboard, and GPU, monitor, keyboard, trackpad, and battery. You buy the rest. It's essentially the same as buying from a boutique.

Gaming laptops also typically use the MXM3.0b interface for their graphics cards, meaning that if you can get a hold of a better MXM3.0b card later down the line and upgrade as long as it stays within the thermal and power tolerances of your laptop (TDW). As of now, I haven't seen any liquid cooling solutions at all for laptops.

The GTX285 from nVidia is old news. It's a slightly more powerful version of the GTX280. The ATi HD5850 can beat it without breaking a sweat, but the latter also has the advantage of being a newer card. The GTX285 is more than capable of playing IL-2 at its highest settings (can you say water=5? ), and because of IL-2's preference for nVidia, I recommend you get an nVidia card if that is your primary game. If you play a variety, then an ATi 58x0 is the way to go.

As far as laptop graphics, the GTX280M may not play as smoothly on maximum settings when you get into higher resolutions like 1920x1200 or 2560x1600. However, there are a couple of laptops that offer two GTX280Ms in SLI mode. These models are the Alienware M17x and the Clevo M980NU. They can power through just about anything short of Crysis right now. The new ATi Mobility HD5870 in the ASUS G73JH-A1 probably can, too (it's clocked at desktop HD4850 speeds with GDDR5 memory). But this is if you want to play at the highest settings. I'm a stickler for graphics, so I only play games at their highest settings or not at all. My small monitor makes that possible with my GeForce 7800GT and old Athlon 64 3200+. If you settle for good enough, than there are tons of affordable laptops which run nVidia GTX260Ms or GTS360Ms (the nVidia GTS300 series is a rebadged GTX200 series) that can do it for you. Or you can crank the details but at a lower resolution.

To be honest, I've not had much experience with IL-2 compared to most of you. It's a bit flaky when it comes to graphics. It doesn't appear like a graphically intense game, but its OpenGL implementation leaves it stuttering about unless you tweak it just right. I find it strange that my computer can play it better (with UP 2.0 and full details, water=3) than my friend's, and he has a GeForce 8500GT, which technically speaking from a specs standpoint should outrun my 7800GT. :-?