Octopus Overlords

I seem to be pretty isolated right now at work and was thinking of doing some gaming on breaks and lunch since it is quite a walk to spend time with other people I know. I had a quick look at the up to date gaming laptops from Dell, Falcon, and Alienware and after a day or so to think about it, I just don't want to spend that much money on one. I thought about the fact that there has to be a lot of laptops for sale on ebay and other places that could play games that are a few years old of which I have many I've never played (all of the bioware and black Isle RPG's). So what I really need to know is what kind of graphics chip should I be looking for in an older laptop. I would like to know which ones were offered that had at least directx 8 capabilities. The old laptop I have will not run NWN, is there an older one (read 1 to 2 years) that is the equivalent of the Nvidia 4200 or 4600 at least.

In that age, you will find some nVidia 4x00 based laptops for the most part. Up until the Radeon 9700, ATI didn't compete very well in the laptop front. Most of their stuff was considerably older than the nVidia stuff. How much are you planning on spending? You can get a good laptop that will play most games for under $1000.

I would look at the Dell 8500 series if you can. Toshiba makes some laptops that are pretty good for gaming, too. One thing you want to look for is dedicated video ram. I had a toshiba that I bought from best buy a few years ago that had a mere 16 meg of video ram. It did play WC3, decently, though, where the compaq I got a year later with up to 64 meg of shared video ram would not. The laptops with dedicated video ram also tend to have better video chipsets.