The mobility radeon 16 mb will play alot of the 'OLDER' games like UT and Quake well but when you get into games like MOH or BF1942 the game play will be extremely choppy or wont load (termination error) due to the fact that you’re going to be using older technology with newer code... But don't under estimate the power of notebooks. The chipsets in the notebooks are designed differently then their desktop counter parts. if your looking to get by with great performance go with the ati 9000 mobile or the NVIDIA 5200 mobile both offer great gamming performance and I believe 99% of notebooks that offer these chipsets give a basic 64 megs of ram to allow you to play 'today’s games' if you want top performance go with the ati 9600 mobile.. New batches of games are coming out in the first quarter of 2004, with that the minimum specs will surely increase thus making older machines obsolete... remember 32-64 Megs of video ram is minimum, 64-128 is recommended.
1 other thing with notebooks is to do your homework on the screen... nothing worse then having blurs/ghosts while playing games.
http://www.alienware.com/system_pages/area-51m.aspx
http://www.voodoopc.com/systems/notebook.aspx
just some food for thought... also check out review sites that don’t favor Intel or amd / ati/nvidia..
Whether your spending 1k or 4k on a notebook makes sure your happy with it... Also check the "RETURN POLICY" when ordering online... even if it's 15days that should be long enough... load a good game and max the settings. Be careful of restocking fee's...
My 2cents... hit a computer show... Usually the good ones start in January you can test/look/and especially HAGGLE PRICES to get a really good deal.