I'm currently using a Lenovo W510, i7 820QM, 24GB RAM, Quadro FX 880M (essentially a Geforce 330M) for an XP (and Vista, dual-boot) gaming laptop. Seems good enough for Far Cry which is what I'm currently playing.

Either of the above will be more than good enough for XP in my opinion.

My main laptop is a HP Elitebook 8470p
i5-3320M (upgradeable to i7), 8GB DDR3 1600MHz, AMD Radeon HD 7570M 1GB
I run Linux, but it performs well in games.

At a glance, they seem to be decent options, if a bit pricey imho. I'll assume you have looked into driver availability by yourself?

One thing I would like to point out is that quite a few of the earlier XP games (the XP era is a looong one) are from that awkward phase were the resolution could not be set too high, or things would become unreadable, and/or you'd need a 4:3 aspect ratio. In some cases you might even still want a CRT... So I recommend looking into how these machines scale things, and whether it looks good to you.

edit: Oh yeah one more thing, you'll probably want 32 bit XP for compatibility reasons, so half of the 8GB of ram on these babies will be wasted. Unless you hack PAE back in. But it's not like XP era games need that much.

It's a bit of a crappy era for laptops... 2005-2010 was lead free solder teething problems and bumpgate hell. Then just as you come out of the era things stop getting XP drivers. Centrino class machines from the beginning of that period seem to be good survivors, but typically didn't get graphics chipsets that do well on games past the 98/XP overlap. (i.e. games that still worked on 98 or ME were playable, full hard DX9+ not so much)

ThinkPad T series, T400 and T500, initially with Ati 3xxx graphics available, later models with nVidia might be worth looking at. There's a big modding community around them too, can get 3rd party upgrades. But that's tending to the mid half of XP gaming.... though late XP doesn't need XP really.

Thanks for the replys so far.
Yeah looked at drivers and both either have official or unofficial drivers to an extent.

I've had IBM thinkpads before and the GPUs in them are just terrible and only good for early XP gaming.
I'm looking at more mid to late XP era.

I'm open to any other suggestions 😀

Period correct laptop for XP will be underpowered becasue its a laptop after all. Id go with later hardware, make sure you can find drivers for XP first. If you can find one that still has a cardbus slot I would use a audidgy zs notebook card in it.

I'm going to be working on getting an Alienware M17x with dual 260ms (can't imagine one needs much more than that for 95% or more of XP games) running xp this week. I can report back my findings, once I get the hard drive caddies and ssds I ordered for it this week since I found the correct textmode driver, if you'd like. You're going to run into issues with AHCI drivers if you go too new. The M17x wasn't too bad, but the M11x I also got was a total nightmare no thanks to Intel but seems to work quite well mostly. You can find the M17x with dual 280ms as well and put a core 2 extreme qx9300 that'll overclock to 3.02ghz as well. If you have any specific games you want tested I can do my best to as well. I could just be totally blind but anything after Intel ICH10 seems to be hard to find textmode drivers for. I don't think anyone wants to put up with six hours of 0x07b blue screens like I had to. An alternative option would be like a core 2 or 1st gen i series Clevo chassis laptop but those are getting harder and harder to find now.

Not sure about Clevo but in general 1st gen Core i are still in the bump/solder problem zone on chipsets and graphics, I had to send two back under warranty back in the day. I have another i7 sitting around waiting for me to git-gud with the heat gun. 2nd gen seemed fine apart from some nVidia problems still.

The Clevo chassis laptops I have (I have four, five if you count my modern one that's my actual laptop) seem to be quite solidly built at least for that time period, at least core 2 and above. My D901C I have which is a Q6600 based laptop doesn't have any issues other than the fact I need a mxm card for it that I'm not using elsewhere. Older ones are a bit hit and miss, my D9T (P4 socket 775) and D9k (Athlon 64 x2) both needed work to get fully functional but my socket 478 based Alienware Area 51m with a fx 5700 go has no issues. Granted those three and similarly vintage ones are probably too old for what OP wants. Maybe I'm just lucky but I haven't really had many 'gaming' laptops needing reballing/reflowing yet. My D9T needed a new GPU due to what I believe was failed vram thanks to the fact the previous owner never cleaned it out and cooked it but I got lucky with a deal on another X800 for it, my XPS M1730 has one of it's two 8700ms seemingly dead (though that may be a whole different issue I need to dive into one day) and my Dell Inspiron 9200 with a Radeon Mobility 9700 in it has an issue with the ram sockets.

Maybe if OP wants I can go over the xp era (ish) gaming laptops I have in my collection in detail with the pros and cons of them all. Honestly the M11x with its overclocked core 2 duo and Gt335m seems to be quite good enough for most if not all xp era games you couldn't reasonably run easily on a modern system and even some you can from my testing so far, plus it and the M17x I'm going to be working on soon have cooling on the motherboard chipsets so I'm not overly concerned about them failing. This M11x had apparently almost 87,000 hours on it's hard drive and works perfectly fine after replacing it. I believe post D900 series Clevo used active cooling on their chipsets as I know my D901c has it. I don't have any newer Clevo chassis laptops that run XP, as my Intel Comet Lake based Clevo laptop certainly won't, so I can't say for sure.

Yeah heading out of the bump and solder problem era, the higher end seemed to be less affected earlier, but the mid to low and barely better than integrated still had problems a couple of years longer. Maybe due to using the same chips and rebranding upward, as they do in mobile.

It certainly helps that the higher end also gets a lot better cooling. I know after I put Gelid GC Extreme thermal paste in the Alienware M11x and didn't even replace the thermal pad for the chipset it runs at 55c on the cpu and 50c on the gpu during gaming. The chipset, gpu and cpu are all one heatsink as well. I know the 17 runs warmer but not concerningly so, I'll know more later this week when all the parts arrive. Most of the lower end laptops I've run into have zero cooling on the chipset and minimum if any cooling on the discrete video chip. I've seen someone adding copper shims to chipsets without cooling, though it's hard to say how effective just the shim is when you can't say if it gets any airflow.