Gaming notebooks have gone from brick-like, underperforming duds to platforms that can rival all but the most powerful of desktops in a relatively short amount of time. Much of this change has been brought about by new graphics, storage and processor architectures that put an emphasis upon efficiency without sacrificing high level performance. The result is some increasingly blurred lines between desktops and more mobile platforms.

No other category personifies this shift better than the high end gaming notebook category and that's exactly what we'll be focusing on in this roundup. While all of the usual players like ASUS, Origin, Eurocom, Gigabyte, Acer and MSI are present and accounted for in this market, there's not all that much variation from one product to another. AMD has for the most part been pushed out of every $1500+ price point since their processor and GPUs just haven't been able to compete on the efficiency against alternatives from Intel and NVIDIA. We?re actually starting to see fully-enabled desktop components make their way into the portable space.

The performance delta between desktops and notebooks may have shrunk but that doesn't mean high end gaming laptops are what I would call inexpensive. The price / performance ratio still lies very much upon the shoulders of desktop PCs and you'll still need to make some pretty large financial sacrifices if you want to combine portability with high in-game framerates.