studio XPS 13 and world of warcraft

I'm thinking of getting the studio XPS 13 but have some concerns. I tried searching the forum but didn't find anything related to this.

1. How is this laptop for gaming? I'd like to be able to play World of warcraft at 30+ FPS in pretty much any situation with medium graphic settings (native LCD res, shadows OFF,everything else medium high). This means I don't want to lag in PVP or PVE, but I don't mind a little lag in big cities like dalaran. Assume 4GB ram and higher end CPU, running on AC power. I want to have 30+ fps in all the BGs and arena but dont mind some lag in wintergrasp.

2. I hear a lot of concerns about heat output. I Also hear that the new A06 bios or whatever fixes the heat issues. Will the laptop be stable to play WoW for several hours (plugged in to AC) assuming I have good airflow around the laptop? it would be slightly elevated on a flat surface. I wouldnt mind buying one of those laptop cooler things that go under it either.

I'm a pretty technical guy so I dont mind you throwing me stats/numbers about WoW graphics settings/fps/scenarios. The more detail the better. To compare, my main rig is a dell PC with E6420 CPU (C2D 2.13 ghz) , 4GB ram, and nvidia 7950GT vid card and I find my WoW fps to be good enough. I am looking for similar quality or hopefully slightly better performance from the laptop. Is this a realistic expectation?

Thanks for the insight. My goal here is a portable laptop that can play WoW pretty well. My current laptop is old and is 15.4" screen which I find too big to lug around.

 

I just got a XPS 13 today, it runs pretty warm in just normal use. For gaming I'm on my 24" widescreen Dell XPS desktop, havent installed any games on this XPS 13 yet but its pretty small when your used to a bigger screen. I personally thought you tube videos were choppy but then I'm used to very good cards. This is fine for portability, not sure how good its going to be at games when its 256MB graphics. Maybe ok but worth hearing from others who have really put it to a good testing, I've just got this today.

 

From what I've seen WoW doesn't require a very high end GPU to achieve decent FPS. That said, I don't play WoW and couldn't tell you.

The laptop overall isn't exactly a great gaming laptop however. The "Nvidia 9500" is actually an "Nvidia 9500 GE" which is Nvidia's term to refer to a 9400M G + 9200M GS SLI configuration and this setup translates to offering slightly worse performance than a 9500 GS (though better battery life when NOT doing anything graphically intensive) and hence worse performance than the 8600GT on the XPS 1530. Also note that there are many reports that this laptop gets HOT when not conserving power so I wouldn't plan on using it on my lap.

 

I use WoW on occassion, and I have not seen any issues in latency, and that's with the base GPU (9400).

 

I'm just installing Call of duty World At War, will see what this ones like.

Updated: Well I tried Call of duty World at War and its hardly playable on medium/low settings.

 

thats too bad...thanks for trying it out though

 

Thats ok I wanted to see what its like too. The way it played was like theres a bit of lag there, and thats in performance mode on the graphics card and medium settings in the game. I found the XPS 13 getting pretty warm in the game, I've now come out and put the XPS 13 in power saving mode and you can really feel the temps go down to warmish unlike in performance mode where the XPS 13 is hot.

 

while I don't have WoW (and I'm not sure how graphics intense it is), I fired up COD4 on it and I was getting about 15-10fps on average ( review & cod4 gameplay footage), with max settings (other than screen resolution). And yes, it does get VERY warm, however it does stay surprisingly quiet.

 

Wow at native resolution, max settings except shadows 1 notch above minimum, no aa, no af, 20-40 fps depending on location, generally very playable. I presume on medium setting it will be 30+ all the time with integrated 9400. SLI, as usual with this laptop, degrades performance by 20-30%. It gets hot after some time, but not unbearable.

 

Keep in mind that Wintergrasp on a High pop server can challenge even the most powerful systems.

You should be expecting lag in in PvE and PvP, when large numbers of players and spell effects are involved, unless you're willing to turn particle effects right down.

WoW can be a lot more demanding that people seem to think.

 

its true, but you can change the default video setting in wow.
besides unlike crysis, wow is cartoon graphics, playing at med settings doesnt feel like losing much of graphics details.

 

Sorry, bad info. Wasn't wearing my glasses and mistook the 13 for a 16

 

How will that give him an idea? Thats the 1640

 

"SLI, as usual with this laptop, degrades performance by 20-30%" - Im finding this to be the case with my dell xps 13. Is this just the way it is? if so whats the point of having boost mode at all!?! or is there something going on that can be fixed

 

I'm also concerned about the issue that amihalceanu and iby have; is it like that for all 1340's? because I'm actually about to buy one tomorrow, but might rethink because of this =/

 

This wasn't the case for me (or atleast it didn't feel like it). Occasionally I feel a bit more "variation" in frame rates but I haven't noticed worse performance overall.

 

You have to remember the xps 13 uses hybrid sli. It's different from a normal SLI in that the 2 video cards that work in tandem are not comparable in speed. The integrated 9400 is a 16 core chip whereas the 9200m is a 8 core chip, so they are imbalanced. Beyond this fact though, only the people at nvidia could explain why hybrid sli behaves like it does. On my system, while framerates may technically go up, the experience is degraded due to very large inconsistency (most games fluctuate in performance very wildly). This is also the case with WoW. Average framerates rise somewhat (though it is difficult to tell for sure how much, because of the nature of the game makes it impossible to replicate the exact same situation) but fps fluctuates so much (with lower minimum than without sli) that is feels like the game works worse. Also, in my experience, wow performance is more dependent on cpu rather than videocard, presuming the videocard is decent. The 9400m at 1280x800 is almost (but not quite) sufficient to not affect WoW performance negatively.
To be honest, the integrated 9400 is a very good chip for a 13'' (much faster than 8400m and 9300) so I have no problem using it. The only thing is that, as it is, the 9200m is useless, at least to me.
Thus my advice for someone wanting to buy a studio 13 xps would be to just get the integrated 9400. If you can afford the difference and don't mind waiting for better drivers, hybrid sli could offer a tangible advantage sometime in the future though.