Improve your laptop’s gaming performance

Improve your laptop’s gaming performance

Portability doesn’t necessarily mean a sacrifice in output. Here’s how to tweak your machine for a better playing experience

    Laptops built specifically for gaming are almost never as powerful as desktop computers built for this purpose in mind. You can stuff a lot of extra hardware into a desktop as well as cooling systems and so on, and weight will not be a consideration. It’s a different question altogether for gaming laptops. It is very difficult to upgrade them and the best ones anyways are pretty heavy, not to mention being pricey. If you’re spending that much money, you might as well try to get the best out of what you have with the tools at your disposal.
Driver updates You can’t do much with the drivers that are shipped with laptops, save for some downloads that the manufacturer might release now and then. And even in this case, the upgrades might not really be relevant to your gaming experience.
    What is relevant, however, are the drivers for your video card, which can add some juice to the frame rate and refresh rate of the visual experience. This is quite important if you like playing fastpaced games like first-person shooters. For example, if you have a laptop that works on Intel, as a majority of commerciallyavailable laptops in India come shipped with, the manufacturer website has a section on the website that leads you through a diagnostic tool for what kind of processor you have. When you find out this data, you can then visit your dealer and shop around for an upgrade.
    As for ‘unofficially’ using hacked drivers, the same can coax out some enhanced and increased performance from the hardware.
Size and type of hard drive While the size of a hard drive is not really critical for when shopping for a regular-use laptop (because you can always store extra data on external hard drives and USB memory pods), you will need a larger-than-usual hard drive for a gaming laptop. Games take up a lot of space and so does saving the settings and progress of the game, each time you end a session. Solid State Drives are a bit more pricey, but you get none of the above-mentioned problems. And the good thing is that as flash hard drives get more common, their price will drop as well.
Overclocking You can try to modify the core clock as well as the memory clock of your laptop. Without getting into too much detail, the former is the speed of the actual processing cores on the GPU, while the memory clock is the speed of the memory used to buffer video data. There is a limit to how much you can speed these up — go overboard and your system circuits will get fried, because laptops don’t have the kind of cooling capacity that desktops have. If it came at 2.9 Ghz, you can probably overclock it to 3.2 or 3.4 Ghz without too much of an issue and without changing voltage too much. Go to your BIOS, find out what values cause you to have 2.9 Ghz, and alter them to change your frequency to whatever you want, keeping in mind that if your processor isn’t ‘unlocked’, then changing your frequencies will also change the speed your RAM runs at. Again, overclocking laptops is not normally recommended, do so at your own risk.
Screen settings The screen refresh rate is the number of refreshes your monitor does per second. Your monitor usually updates the screen 60 times per second, making it impossible to see more than 60 frames per second. Gaming laptops are sometimes limited by the volume and quality of their video memory. The memory available to a video card is important, because it acts as the highway between your GPU and your display. If it’s out of room, a traffic jam forms, and your frame-rates start to dip. And lastly, it goes without saying that laptops come with a lot of unnecessary software that can be uninstalled or deactivated. All of this, coupled with a desire to experiment, will only lead to a better gaming experience.
    reagan.rasquinha@timesgroup.com