Oh snap is RIGHT. After nearly 2.5 years of chugging along on my super-slow little netbook that could barely run three tabs in Chrome at the same time, I’ve got a new system. Got my hands on an ASUS K55A series laptop. Nothing too high-end, but it does have a third-gen Intel core i7-3630QM under the hood and the HD 4000 integrated graphics is no slouch when it comes to gaming. I fired up Dragon Age and Team Fortress 2 last night just to see how it would perform. Couldn’t max out the graphics like you’d be able to using a dedicated ATI or Nvidia graphics solution, but I didn’t have to settle for minimum settings either. The CPU runs nominally at 2.4GHz but it will boost up to 3.4GHz (in the screenshot you’ll see it’s down-clocked to 1.2GHz when not being taxed to save on power). Four dedicated cores with hyper-threading enabled… everything runs pretty smooth, at least everything I’ve thrown at it so far. So, when time allows I may play a few rounds of TF2 or maybe try out something new. Gonna revisit some old RTS games I really like also, like some of the Command & Conquer series. And I can’t wait to use Photoshop or decode DVD’s on this system, should run fairly fast. Lemme know what games you guys are playing right now. Woot!