A laptop for WoW

Hi all,

I play World of Warcraft and am in the market for a new laptop. My current laptop is an IBM R40 with a 32meg RADEON 7500 (which interestingly enough is on the list of not supported cards for WoW) and unless you're in a major city, it actually plays WoW fairly well. The down side is that the laptop overheats and destroys the IDE controller on the motherboard if you play it for too long.

In any event, that laptop is being passed along to a family member and I have been considering purchasing a new Dell. The reason for my post is that I have had 2 friends buy newer Dell laptops (about a year ago) and the performance was just downright poor. The game would look ok, but every second or two it looks like it hangs on a frame and so the gameplay is just terrible. They have 64mb and 128mb nVidia cards in their laptops I believe.

I have been considering buying a e1505, 2GHz Duo, 2Gigs of Ram, 60Gig 7200 RPM hard drive, 256Meg x1400, and the rest I suppose is fairly unimportant. I am curious if anyone has a machine similar to this (Dell and x1400 especially) and knows if World of Warcraft plays fairly well on it (Probably in around 1280x800). I am not too worried about perfect smoothness in major cities, just that it will not drive me nuts with graphics sticking.

Finally, I have a friend who has a Gateway with an Athlon XP and a 256 Meg x600 and I know that machine plays WoW great. I don't really like Gateways, but does anyone who plays WoW have a laptop other than the Dell I am looking at they would reccomend that one can get in for around 1500-$1800?

Thanks a lot.

Reed

 

That e1505 will be more than enough for WoW. If you go for a dedicated graphics card you can't go wrong with WoW, even a Radeon 200 will manage it (though perhaps not as those resolutions)

Aim for a laptop with at least X300 graphics and you'll be fine.

 

I would go for the Asus S96j. It's built a lot better then the E1505 and has a more powerful X1600. The X1600 is twice the power of the X1400. It's a great price too. I'd recommend powernotebooks.com or geared2play.com. The Asus W3j is also a great option! But you should post what your looking for in the What Should I Buy forum. And fill out the FAQ there.

 

pull the trigger, the e1505 will handle it without a doubt.

 

I bought and e1705 about 3 months ago (used the coupon) for $1500 i got it with the GeForce Go7800 and it runs perfectly on maxed out graphics, plus if you go this way you dont have to worry about other games working on it.

 

I'll second the S96j and posting the FAQ.

If you play games now, you'll probably play others later, and getting the E1505 wouldn't be good for that.