Laptop for Total war games

Recently I've been on forums and websites trying to find a laptop that would work best for simulation and strategy games. Everyone has recommended the Sager NP1590 however when talking to a friend he thought it might be more then I need to spend to play the games I want to play at a high quality. I'm incredibly interested in Shogun Total War 2 and Rome 2 total war along with all past total war games and the future total war games. Are there any laptops out there that may be around 1200 that will give me great performance for these games or is the NP9150 still my best bet?

 

I think you can get a NP9150 with 7970m for 1350 bucks, good deal! and can maximize Empire right now, probably Rome2 will bring it down to its knees though (by knees, high with some sort of cheap AA )

 

I haven't been able to find it with anything other then a NVIDIA

 

i LOVE total war games, and i have a p150em with the 675m. problem with shogun 2 is that it doesnt utilize multiple core on your CPU, it uses only 1 core, so my 675m gets capped by the CPU at times (i.e. frame rates drops in crowded battles). i think this will be fixed with rome 2

p.s. i like to play on highest quality at 1080p

 

Sorry bro, but 675m will be having trouble when Rome 2 will release (by trouble I mean about high settings). If you can buy 675mx, get that, otherwise try to push your budget a bit with 680m (best mobile gpu on the market). BUT if you wait, new gpus are in the corner.

 

So with my laptop purchase how would I avoid the CPU issue?

Ok this may be a dumb question but being a novice at this. When the new gpu's come out. How do I tell which one is the best? So you would upgrade the GPU to the 680 if possible and what do I upgrade to avoid CPU bottleneck? (sorry once again a novice)

 

There is no such thing as a novice question bro, no worries, we all have been there! It totally depends on the game you want to play. Now RTS games usually depends a lot on the CPU, however, I am able to drive my 7970m to 99% utilization at Empire Total War (I am not experiencing the CPU bottleneck the other guy experiences) but I have 2920xm, the other guy maybe gaming on something worse. If you will have say 3720qm, I think it will be more than enough for Empire, and Rome 2 to drive your GPU to full utilization. 680m is a really good GPU which can max most games just out of the box. But it is a bit expensive. 7970m can do the almost the same as well, which reseller are you considering? it is interesting that they are not offering 7970m..

 

Well pretty much based of other peoples recommendations and my inexperience I am looking at the Sager NP1950 special edition. (Considering it is still there when I have the funds to purchase this in a few months). XOTIC PC | Sager NP9150 / Clevo P150EM - Special Edition It seems to have everything I would need. But if I could get the same thing for less that is obviously always a good thing.

 

the problem here is that the engine doesnt use all cores equally, they use all 4 cores, but at very low loads

when you go down to the fight its were things get nasty, the closer you get to the troops the more details that the engine renders, and some of that is off loaded to the cpu

I hope they stop using soon warscape (or actually patch it right, this is improbable, the team was disbanded), its on time, they have used it for far more games than the older engines (1 engine was used for stw and mtw, the other was rtw and m2tw)

 

Doing a bit of research I found this laptop which has the 680M 16GB of Ram and the i73630 for around 100 dollars cheaper then the NP1950. Any downfalls? FORCE/MSI 16F3 (36-024) 680M | XOTIC PC

 

Not to mention better speakers

Most MSI resellers also handle Sager/Clevo if you want to compare prices too. Get the machine that best suits you

 

but keep in mind that MSI machines doesnt allow you to take it apart and clean/modify without voiding warranty though.