Depends what your configuration is, if it's pretty high quality stuff, it shouldn't be THAT bad, probably slightly noticable though.

 

The monitor size sucks, but make sure you get a laptop with a good graphics card. If you want one for gaming, check out alienware.com

Those are gamer's PCs

 

get a notebook, I recommend IBM T40p or Panasonic Toughbook W2. You will not regret getting either of those notebooks, I guarantee it (well, except for the price )

 

I haven't turned my desktop system at home on in a year..

Notebook all the way

 

Screw gaming. Leave that for the Xbox or PS2.

Notebook
Pro: Makes plane trips 10 times more tolerable.

 

If you're looking at gaming on a notebook, you'll want to get at least a 64MB video card - either Radeon 9000 (the mobile Radeon 9600 looks awesome, but they're really out yet) or the Nvidia mobile chips. And for what it's worth when comparing.... the Centrino Pentium M CPU's are actually faster performing than their speed indicates. A 1.6Ghz Pentium M is actually about as fast as a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 (plugged in and on max performance hehe). It's a different architecture so, like the AMD chips, it does more work per CPU clock than the Pentium 4. So aside from the video system being not-as-good as the desktops, the next 'limiting' factor is the harddrives. All in all though, you can get a pretty decent thin-and-light notebook that can handle most games without problems now. Just 6 months ago, if you wanted to do gaming, you had to get a desknote but I prefer not lugging 10 lbs of stuff around, and I prefer battery life more than 1 hour hehe.

As for the monitor size, you can always hook up a bigger external monitor to a laptop. One of the beauties of a notebook.
Hope that helps.