I work away a fair amount and am thinking about getting a laptop so i can get in some gaming while i'm stuck in a hotel. Can anyone recommend a decent gaming laptop or is it just not worth the effort?

Also, is it possible to do online gaming over 3G, or is wifi a must?

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Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.

No you cant do any gaming with the 3G, or atleast I would strongly recomend against it. Im using it right now and have a solid connection where im at. Im nearly never below a ping of 150 when playing TF2. Its just not bareble as it is now. Main issue isnt the downloading times but rather the uploading. Im stuck with this contract for another 9 months and cant afford to have two connections. Trust me, you dont want this crap for gaming. :-12

I did some thorugh investigations on the gaming laptops a few months ago, and ye they are playable if you got the money to spend. Dell´s XPS GAMING or alienware´s Area 51 m17x is what you are looking for if you are goin topnotch, but be prepered to spend about 2000$ on one if you are buying new.

Yeah 3G isn't doable for online gaming, so use the wifi/wired in your room.

Can't you use HSDPA ?

DG has a dell laptop, they're pretty good, very expensive though. Cost 2000 euros. You can game on it though.
At mobile shops here you can get wireless modems which will connect you through hsdpa, i don't know what the ping will be. If you want, i can check into it when i'm home, i will connect my mobile to my computer and let it function as modem, do you want me to test that?

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M.A.S.K. , is the mighty power that can save the day

3G gaming really depends on area coverage. Within the big cities here, Copenhagen, Aarhus, Odense, Roskilde etc. I can easily game. Whenever I exit the big cities, my ping goes to around 150-200.

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<@Howard_s> usa just has a made up economy - they can't really go broke

JuncoPartner: I could barely hold it up for long.

Thanks for the offer Bucky, a real world test would be really useful.

I've had dell before and found them to be reliable, if a little on the expensive side.

Thanks for your help and i look forward to the results of the test.

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Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.

You'll need to test on HSDPA tbh, G3 will not take u anyware anyway!

moPP has only a laptop, and plays pretty good

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We Shall Not Be Moved!

Aye, with HSDPA it might work, 3G is doomed...

I spend a couple of nights away each week and bought a Dell XPS 1530 laptop so I could a bit of gaming and movie watching on the evening (read porn ).

If you are interested you can read my personal review here:

http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthre ... marchudman

Playing TF2 is ok, but I do have to reduce the setting right down.

I don't use 3G - I just use hotels that have free internet access in the rooms. The De Vere hotels all have free internet. PING times vary alot but normally around the 100 mark.

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The stats below lie. I'm actually much much worse.

alright, a bit overdue, but better late then nothing at all. At this moment I'm connected through my mobile on my laptop at work. I officially have an HSDPA line, but the drivers to use the n95 as a modem downgrade it to 460 kbps. So that roughly gives you 3G right? I get a download rate of 115 Kb per second.
I've ran a winmtr for about 10 minutes. There were a couple of outliers with pings around 180 or 1600. But to be honest, in those ten minutes of which I watched 5 minutes non stop, I only saw the ping reach that high twice, very very short, for the rest it was pretty stable. At least, stable as far as my norm goes for 3G gaming.
I got an average ping of 93, best ping of 78. It varies a lot in time along the range of 80 to 125. As far as my results have shown me now, it's pretty much doable. If you're just in for the fun and just want to shoot some ppl and have a laugh with your friends, it's very much very fine I personally find a ping of 80 to 125 very playable in these conditions.
Conditions that you are away from home, away from your beloved internet connection and awesome gaming machine, you don't even have an internet connection through wifi that's unprottected or crackable and you just want to have some fun with your mates, then this is certainly a way to go.
Keep in mind that these aren't mint conditions, but they're not that bad as well. I'm in a village at work, but I'm 10 to 15 KMs away from the big city I live, it's not raining or storming, and my mobile company is one of the best in NL. Vodafone offers us a staggering 3,6Mbps connection on your mobile. I don't think there are any other places then directly next to the transmitter that'll give you those speeds, but I get fairly nice hsdpa speeds on my phone and I have internet wherever I go.
By the way, to give you an idea of what I'm gaming with, it's not that much , have to run the games at low and resolution at 800x600 on a laptop, but for what it's supposed to i'm very content, it's a mirracle it can run games But in bf2 i get about 40 fps

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M.A.S.K. , is the mighty power that can save the day