72 Unique Guild Members 318 Characters (alts included) 0 Raiding Characters 103 Website/Forum Members 0 Posts in 24 hours 3 Posts in 7 days Natalius is the last poster
I was just wondering how many of you play WoW on laptops... I currently have a desktop that I want to sell to help a friend out and I've been wanting a laptop soooo bad. My desktop lags kinda bad in SW and I'm sure wouldn't do great in raids so I want to get prepared before I catch up to you guys at 80 (I'm two bars from being only 14 levels away!)
Anyways, I didn't know how hardware friendly WoW is and the necessary video card/processor/amount of Ram I need to run it at high settings, I only have a medicore computer tech knowledge.
I found a dell XPS M1530 that had 320Gig HD, 4 gig ram, and 128MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400 vid card. Pretty cheap, but anyways, I'm rambling. Keep in mind I will likely be using this laptop like a desktop so battery life isn't a huge deal to me, only integrated wireless. If you have any other suggestions I'd appreciate it if this laptop is overkill... just need to run WoW, take notes in class, and store 10gigs of music while still running vista smoothly.
I've been looking at laptops for so long and maybe a new desktop would be the best route to go. I'm just hating my 7-12 fps anywhere outside, and I want to run near max settings and have no lag and nice fps. It seems like it's all about the ram and my current cpu has 2 gigs. Anyways, any advice or ideas would be great, thanks guys.
OK, first of all you're going to have to lay out some coin for a laptop with this kind of power. Some things you'll want to shoot for:
1. A 17 inch screen. This is a must if you're gaming on the laptop itself. If you plan on attaching an external monitor and porting "video out" to that monitor, this isn't such a big deal. A 13 or 15 in screen is just too cramped for playing WoW.
2. 4 GB of RAM. This is the new standard going forward. You could probably get by with 3 if you had to scrimp. Do not get 2 GB of RAM under any circumstances.
3. An Intel Core 2 Duo Mobile processor (shoot for the newer 6MB cache ones if you can). The AMD ones are OK too if you find a good value.
4. And finally - and most importantly - the video card. Get a GeForce GO 9600M GT PCI-Express video card or higher. This is a dedicated video card solution with it's own video processor and RAM that do not leech performance from your main processor and system RAM. Do not get an integrated video card - that is the kiss of death for gaming and you will not be satisfied.
OK, the bad news is that you're looking at $1200-$1300 and up for a system like this. The good news is that a lot of builders make machines like this. Pretty much all the major system makers have machines that push out great gaming performance with specs like those above. Go buy a copy of "PC Gamer" off of the newstands and look at all the ads inside from the various manufacturers to get an idea of what's out there.
BTW: if you want to stick with a desktop, you can save $500-$600 and get the same, if not not better performance.
GOOD LUCK!
Eld
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------------- Kat is 4 fite. Bares is 4 tank. Trees is 4 you hots things. Boomchikin is 4 spam moonfires. Cheata is 4 u run away. =^.^=
I play on a laptop; I've got a 15.4-inch widescreen (I think, might be bigger but not by much) and I play on 1.25 GB of RAM. I honestly couldn't tell you much about my video card, but it was considered ahead-of-the-game hardware when I bought it three years ago -- which could mean any number of things.
If you want to fully experience the scenery of WoW, you'll need the kind of hardware Eldwillwind listed; but I've been able to run WoW at a workable framerate in every town, zone and instance that has ever been released in the game with ~a dozen mods running -- but at the cost of having almost every video feature turned down to the very minimum (texture detail and spell detail are the only ones above the bottom setting).
Should you play WoW on a laptop though, I'd strongly recommend picking up a "chill mat," as they call it. It's basically an extra set of fans, and has helped me out immensely. Any store you would shop at for computer goods should have them.
If I can think of anything else, I'll let ya know.
The 17" screen would be nice but I was on a 15.4 when I was raiding with Inso most of the time and it was doable. If you get all the things you want but the size screen that is optimum you can always dock it unless you are on the road. Just a thought.
I wish I knew the computer sepcs, it was my boyfriends take home work computer that belonged to the county.
No, I'm still looking. I started thinking maybe just a better desktop will suit me just find and I found a really cheap one that looks like it'd be great... I'm torn though. Here's the one I'm looking at.
