PC Notebooks these days have gotten much more powerful. Many notebooks are even good enough to play the latest PC Games. But, what's really needed to play these games?

The main hardware that you need to consider is the video card. All PC Games are graphic intensive and require good video cards in order to play. Onboard video cards will not suffice and even if they meet the minimum requirement to start the game, you will get very poor quality resolution and images.

There are mainly two major brands of video cards, ATI and NVIDIA. As of right now, NVIDIA based video cards are the best on the market.

In the past, pc notebooks were only able to use onboard graphics. These days, you can get notebooks with mobile versions of the high end video cards such as the NVIDIA 8800GTX video card. This single high end video card can play most games with the graphics quality setting to High and sometimes even Very High depending on the game itself.

Now, aside from the video card, what else is needed in a gaming laptop? The other main component is, of course, the CPU. Intel or AMD? Intel CPUs are the leaders in the CPU market. Should you get a mobile CPU or one that's based on the more powerful desktop CPU version? It may cost a bit more but I would prefer the desktop CPU version, not the mobile version.

In regards to memory, or ram, a minimum of 2gb of memory is needed. Anything less and it won't run as efficient.

The operating system actually makes a big difference. You may get better performance with Windows XP but you can only play in Directx10 graphics with Windows Vista. With Windows XP, you are limited to playing with Directx9 graphics. However, if you like performance more than the bit of graphics improvements from Directx9 to Directx10, then I would say to install Windows XP.

A notebook such as this won't be cheap. We are talking about hardware that can cost a desktop to be in the thousands and notebooks with the same spec hardware will cost about a thousand dollars more. These are not simple business machines any longer.