Gaming laptops are becoming more powerful as notebook technology offers up new platforms and ever-increasing performance benchmarks. Gone are the days when a serious PC gamer would laugh at the idea of using a laptop for gaming. While gaming PCs still hold a slight advantage over gaming laptops (mainly when it comes to upgrading), gaming laptops now offer a viable alternative, even for hardcore PC gamers.

If your next computer purchase is a gaming laptop you should consider or check-out these five major factors or components in order to get the best bang for your gaming buck. These five features are: Graphics Card, Processor, RAM, Hard Drive and Display.

Perhaps, the major part of a gaming laptop is the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) or Graphics Card. You want a high-end Graphics card with dedicated RAM to handle all the latest video games. Integrated graphics simply won't be able to process all the complex features of modern 3-D games.

Most top brand name or high-end gaming laptops now have two or more Graphics Cards working together in CrossFire or SLI (Scalable Link Interface) configuration to give you premium handling power. You should also check to see if your new gaming system has at least 250MB of video memory as this will help with the smooth running of your games.

Most high-end gaming laptops now come with at least Dual-core CPUs (Central Processing Units) and we even have quad-processors in some laptops. Your CPU will determine how fast your laptop will run and process data so it is obviously another vital element of your gaming laptop. You want to pick the fastest processor speed that you can afford.

Another very important feature of the gaming laptop is RAM s ince it will also determine how fast your laptop will run. You want at least 1GB of RAM to play most games but many gaming laptops now come with 2 or more Gigs of RAM. Check the type of RAM, DDRAM3 will be faster. Try to get as much RAM as you can afford and prices have been steadily decreasing in recent years so you should be able to get enough RAM to handle most games.

Most gamers go with 7200rpm hard drives as these will be faster than a slower speed hard drive. Many gamers also pick SATA Hard Drives (Serial ATA) which gives them higher performance, especially for high bandwidth applications such as multi-player gaming. In addition, recent gaming laptops are now sporting two or more hard drives which can offer up to a Terabyte of storage.

Solid State Drives are probably the future of gaming but these at the moment are just too expensive. SSDs have no moving parts so they are considered more reliable than an ordinary hard drive with movable parts that can crash.

Gaming laptops are all about the visuals and entertainment features so you want to check the display quality as well as the sound quality. High end gaming laptops now come with full 1080p displays and Blu-ray DVD drives to give you the best in viewing pleasure. You should check the display size and resolution to make sure you're not disappointed.

Gaming laptops have now become popular not only with gamers but with those who want a high-performance laptop for intensive graphic and video work. They are becoming desktop replacements for many PC users and their use is not restricted just to gaming. Regardless of how they're used, if you want a superior gaming rig, just follow the five guidelines mentioned above to help you find a laptop that will be able to handle all your hardware demands and performance levels to meet your gaming needs.