I’m going to be selling off my desktops in the next month or so, so I went about looking for a cheap desktop replacement notebook. I didn’t want to break the bank getting one, but I also didn’t want to have to do without some of the games I play regularly. I ended up finding this notebook, the Fujitsu Amilo Pi 3560 going for really cheap on the website dabs.ie.

Here are the specs:

Intel® Core™2 Duo processor T6600 (2.2GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2MB SLC)
4096 MB (2 x 2048 MB DDR2 @ 800MHz)
500 GB SATA HDD (5400rpm)
Blu-ray Disc™ drive
5 in 1 card reader
Gbps LAN
Integrated Wireless 802.11b/g/pre-n
Bluetooth v2.1
16″ HD LED backlit, BrilliantView 16:9 aspect ratio Resolution: 1366 x 768
NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 240M with 1 GB DDR3 VRAM @ 800 MHz

It was a refurb with no OS, but I decided to take the risk and get it anyway. It paid off, there was some bad sectors on the HDD initially, which is the probable reason as to why no OS was installed, but I cleared them out by running a quick sweep of DBAN on it.

After that, the install of the OS went fine and it’s been running without issues for over a week now. I installed some games on it, to see how it handled them and I was blown away to be honest. I tried Crysis Warhead on it first, expecting it run fairly sluggishly, but I ended up getting it to run really smooth, with a custom config I got from Shadowdane.

Watch the videos below that I recorded and edited to showcase how well it runs the games: Crysis Warhead, Mirrors Edge, Need for Speed: Shift and Street Fighter IV