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Dell Inspiron 5100 - Gaming Laptop?Can the Inspiron 5100 be used as a Gaming laptop? The answers is yes... The Inspiron 5100 can be easily converted into a gaming laptop... and for cheap! What is the most important attribute of a gaming laptop? The size of the video card' memory. And the 64MB version Mobility Radeon 7500 video card is just perfect for gaming. Even on the 32MB version of this card the Inspiron runs less-requiring games fine. While at 32MB the video memory size keeps the Inspiron from handling the most resource-demanding games, the 64MB will handle those. From what I've heard... people were able successfully run numerous games such as... Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, SimCity 4000, Age of Mythology, Wizardry 4, NFS-III, NFS-Porsche Unleashed, GTA3, FS2000 Pro, Combat Flight Sim 2, Il-2 Sturmavik, TOCA2, Ghost Recon and Medal of Honor. These are all pretty graphics-intensive games... and only a few ran with slowdowns... like SimCity 4000. The other ran flawlessly. Overall, the 5100 could be a decent gaming laptop for the money (though it was never designed as a gaming laptop). What else the 5100 has to fit the gaming laptop requirements? With the 15" monitor and 1024 x 768 resolution... even the standard XGA screen makes a good gaming display. DVD movie playback is excellent... same should be true for the video games. Nice picture and color accuracy. (I'm using it instead of a DVD player often). The CD-RW/DVD combo drive is also nice addition to a gaming laptop. The Audio-out port lets you connect a pair of speakers or headphones. 2 USB 2.0 ports can be used to connect a Joystick and an external keyboard... But better yet you could connect a 5.1 Dolby Digital speaker system via the USB port. You may need an Extigy type external sound card or a similar device to do that. The 3 hours battery life may be enough for a full game cycle... Some said they were able to play Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Collector's Edition in its entirety without the laptop shutting off. Playing games on the Internet? Not a problem with a standard built-in 10/100 Ethernet card that provides high-speed internet access. You can even choose the optional Dell TrueMobile 1300 WLAN (802.11b/g, 54Mbps) miniPCI Card for wireless gaming. And of course, the price you pay for Inspiron 5100 gaming is not even comparable to $2,500 - $3000 gaming laptops. See full Dell Inspiron 5100 Review. Contact Us: infogate@comcast.net |
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