Gaming on the Go I work, I game, I travel. Having found the right gaming system for use in my office (see the accompanying article "Games People Play"), I thought it would be nice to have one for the road. Again, I started with Dell, but when I shopped for the high-end Inspiron laptop, I learned that behind the drop-dead gorgeous 15-inch display and sleek chassis was a notebook full of compromises. The Pentium M CPU and NVidia GeForce FX Go5200 mobile graphics chip were both ill-suited for rendering top-end 3D games. Liens Commerciaux That's when I discovered PC Torque, which resells high-end gaming and multimedia laptops built by Sager Technology. The PC Torque 8890 is an absolute beast, a 12-pound behemoth that belches hot air from its cooling vents and splashes 1600 by 1200 pixels of graphic beauty across a huge 16-inch LCD display. Most important, it's a laptop stuffed with desktop-grade components, like a Pentium 4 3.0-GHz CPU, a fast 7200-rpm hard disk, and 1GB of DDR SDRAM. Perhaps most important, the ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 graphics chip set offered desktop-level 3D graphics acceleration in a notebook form factor. Alienware also makes a popular line of gaming laptops. They're even small enough to be considered notebooks. But except for better entry-level graphics chips and a few better options, they aren't completely unlike the Dell Inspiron. Falcon Northwest has its own line of FragBook gaming laptops. The low-end model (the FragBook TL) is comparable to mainstream notebooks, although with cool designs and souped-up graphics. The high-end version (FragBook DR) is more like a gaming desktop replacement, with its 17-inch screen, an ATI Radeon 9700 Turbo graphics chip, and Intel Pentium 4 processor. For me, it's been nine months since I purchased the PC Torque 8890, and it remains a performance kingpin. Playing Lock On: Modern Air Combat--easily the most graphically intense combat flight sim in history--I get smooth action, high frame rates, and incredible graphics. While my notebook will never win a beauty contest with a Dell Inspiron or Toshiba Satellite laptop, I can't complain about performance. Gaming, video compression, photo editing--you name it, this PC will cut right through it. Should you make your next laptop PC a 12-pound beast with a sub-one-hour battery life? For the vast majority of people, the answer is no. Pentium M-based notebooks may compromise game performance, but the advantage in weight, battery life, noise, and heat generally make these more portable systems a good buy. But if you're like me and want a desktop-replacement notebook that will only travel on rare occasions, it might be time to supersize your mobile gaming experience.