Great Game-Ready Laptops

HP HDX 18

HP's HDX line is fairly straightforward--it courts multimedia fiends. From its double-wide demeanor to all the plugs and ports offered here, the HDX18--a fairly fashionable desktop replacement--will stand out on your desk and let you play games in the process. The HDX18 has some brawn to match its beauty. In our WorldBench 6 tests, HP's notebook scored a solid 102. It's not quite the fastest we've seen, but it's more than powerful enough to play some games as well as video. A 2.8-GHz Core 2 Duo CPU (T9600), 4GB of RAM, and nVidia's 512MB GeForce 9600M GT GPU fuel our review unit. I can spit out frame rates of games like Doom 3 (it ran at a respectable 90 frames per second at 1280-by-1024 resolution), but what matters is that this machine can play this season's big guns without much of a hitch. I tooled around Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead on the screen's native 1920-by-1080 resolution. Both looked good and ran fairly smoothly. Combine that with the BD-ROM drive (for Blu-ray discs), HDMI port, flashy finish, and neat exterior, and you have an incredibly handsome home solution you wouldn't mind lugging from room to room. PCW Rating: 84

--Darren Gladstone