Build your own laptop

Posted at: Tuesday 1st August 2006 by James Morris

James Morris shows you how to custom-build your own performance laptop without spending a fortune

With the 2GHz Pentium M and twice the RAM, however, performance improved considerably, producing a very respectable overall Media Benchmarks score of 0.83. The better core specification also assisted gaming, with Far Cry becoming playable at 800 x 600, although you'd need to drop back to 640 x 480 to enable 2x AA and 2x AF. Still, this specification was noticeably more responsive in use than the Celeron M, and offered comparable battery life. Its 120GB drive also has much more room for apps.

As you'd expect, the most expensive specification was also the most accomplished in our benchmarks. The Turion system achieved a commendable overall score of 0.90 in our Media Benchmarks, and it was clearly up to the intended job of mobile gaming. It couldn't quite cope with Need for Speed: Most Wanted at the laptop's native screen resolution, even without any AA or AF, but it was playable with minimum AA and AF settings at 800 x 600. Slightly less demanding games were more adeptly dispatched, although, in most cases, we had to turn off AA to hit the native screen resolution. F.E.A.R. was playable at 1,024 x 768 with the Medium graphics preset, which uses 4x AF but no AA. Similarly, Battlefield 2 was smooth enough with no AA at this resolution, although all the other settings could be left on High.

Meanwhile, Quake 4 ran quite happily at the screen's native pixel resolution of 1,280 x 768. At this setting, with no AA, the laptop managed 38fps on average, but the frame rate dipped worryingly low at times, according to FRAPS. With 2x AA, the average was just 32fps, with a similar dip. However, the dips were most likely to occur during texture loading or auto-saving, as the gameplay felt smooth enough when we were playing it. The laptop raced through Far Cry, though, remaining playable at 1,024 x 768, even with 4x AA and 8x AF enabled. So the Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics may not be quite up to the very latest games at the TFT's native resolution, but anything older should be playable. Not a bad showing for a laptop costing less than £900 to build.

Laptop overclocking

We weren't satisfied with leaving our laptops at their standard settings, and wondered if it was possible to overclock them. However, overclockers will be disappointed by the BIOS options on most laptops. There are usually very few options with which to fiddle, and almost always no overclocking (although some of Rock's models do now offer this facility). Fortunately, software utilities can come to your rescue. Two of our favourites are ClockGen (www.cpuid.com) and SysTool (www.techpowerup.com), both of which can give you direct control over a PC's clock timing chip.

Disappointingly, though, these utilities drew a blank when it came to overclocking the MS-1039 Turion laptop. SysTool read the clocks correctly when set to the ICS952505 chip among other ICS clock chips, but writing new FSB speeds simply didn't work. ClockGen also couldn't write new FSB settings. Similarly, none of the graphics overclocking utilities we tried, including ATITool (www.techpowerup.com) and RivaTuner (www.guru3d.com), were able to access the clocks of the laptop's Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics, so we were stuck with the stock speeds on this machine.