WoW Gaming Laptop

Hi All

I am looking for a new laptop to replace my old Compal IFL90 laptop. I play a bit WoW and I also raid so the new must be able to handle the game at high details.

What sort of laptop should i be looking at? Whats more important when gaming wow. Graphic card og CPU?

I hope you can enlighen me a bit on the topic

 

WoW is a more CPU intensive game than GPU. I have played for 5 years now and every year Blizzard upgrades the game to be more GPU intensive as well. That is why I have upgraded my machine to the current M17x laptop. My son got the M15x and he loves it with WoW (and everything else too). His has the Core i7, that is what I would recommend for you.

 

So specs like

Processor Intel Core i7-720QM 4x1,60GHz (Turbo 2.80GHz) 6MB cache
Ram: Kingston 4GB DDR3-1066 RAM DualChannel
Harddisk: 500GB harddisk S-ATA 2,5" Fluid (Upgradeable to SSD)
Grafik: ATI HD5650 1GB GDDR3 RAM (DirectX 11)
Skærm: 15.6” FullHD-LED Glare panel 1920x1080

Would be able to handle the game pretty nicely?

 

Those specs should work easily.

EDIT: Maybe you don't want to set it to 1080p though.

 

Honestly I think those specs are a bit overkill for WoW. Any gaming laptop under or at $1000 will play it maxed fluidly.

 

It works pretty well on "old" Dell XPS m1330 -- until the crappy GPU burns out, this is .. . But still, just to have an idea: it's 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, and nVidia GeForce 8400M GS with 4 GB RAM. (I wouldn't recommend Dell XPS for gaming anyway; the only thing I would buy off Dell atm is Alienware.)

I would assume any laptop with a dedicated card would be good, as long as it works. If you intend to keep playing other (3D) games, I guess Alienware seems like the best choice (despite the price).

 

I have a laptop with T7500 and 8600GT card and it is horrible to do any raiding on even in ultro low settings and low res.

 

http://www.sagernotebook.com/product_customed.php?pid=250739, under 1k$ will play WoW just fine.

 

you sure there's nothing wrong with settings / clocks / drivers? My roommate has that exact setup and plays WOW on at least medium details without a hitch.

 

well , any core i7 laptop should have no problem as long as it has a proper GPU... but the best and cheapest laptop for any pc game is ASUS G73... for $1400-1600... u can literally max any game... better to spend the cash and get it now rather than upgrading every few years when ur cheap laptop became old.

 

i was able to raid with 20-30fps on the studio 17 in my sig...

tho wow is an old game, one can slap on a plethora of UI's to bring it down a bit...

i noticed one thing tho, running maximized instead of windowed, works well in improving fps on wow.

 

i7-620M, i5-540M or i5-520M would all be better for WoW since the game doesn't gain significant performance over two cores.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/computer/wow-uses-more-than-2-cores/

 

Look at my sig rig. I can play it maxed at 1920x1080. Raids, PVP, anything.. Even Dalaran and never drop below 30ish FPS, in fact it's almost always 45 to 60 FPS (I use VSync).

 

My buddy has the same laptop as you but with the 2.8ghz CPU and has to turn down some options while in 25 man raids.

It also heats up pretty fast and is really loud. The best bang for the buck right now for the OP is the G73.

 

I have done reinstalls and found the latest drivers for everything but it seems that the laptop cant handle wow. I might do something wrong, but since its with the Crappy 8600GT that overheats like nothing else then replacement seems like the perfect choice.

The laptop im looking at is the Compal NBLB2.

 

An Asus G73 is still the cheapest and best choice... it owns all other single card laptops and cooling system is excellent unlike other the other G series Asus laptops... and not to mention price wise on ur part its a ripp off... there's no laptop for the price which can match G73...

 

atleast im not the only one. When i said that in a thread awhile back people said i was on crack I have it the exact same as you but with shadows lowest and i lock it at 30fps never drops. I haven't raided but dalaran is no problem

 

When i look at the different laptop you all uses then it becomes clear, that the main factor for the low preformance of my laptop is the Graphic card. The 8600GT is .

I have ordered a MXM card to put in my current laptop, but since my wifes laptop with the 8600GTS have lots of wierd graphics errors then a new laptop is also needed.

The Asus G73 look really sweet. Thanks for pointing me in that direction.

 

I tried overclocking the 8600GT slightly and it improved preformance alot. i am now able to get around 30 FPS on low settings but i havent tested it while raiding. The card heats up to 86-90 degress C so thats looking fine.

 

Envy 15 can play 1080p with 4xMSAA with highest setting and shadow at 2nd highest.

 

still can't beat Asus G73 with 5870... and its cheaper then envy...

 

Hi guys, just a quick question. Will the new Alienware M11X be able to handle WoW nicely at high/medium settings? Although its been said before that it should handle just fine, i have some serious doubts when it comes to a heavy 25 man raid with plenty of spell effects etc. Just would like to hear more from you guys before i make a decision.

Cheers!

Dell Alienware M11X
SU7300 Core 2 Duo 1.3Ghz
1GB GDDR3 NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 335M
4GB DDR38 - 1066MHz

 

No, it's not looking fine. Particularly not for that card. Do you have a cooling pad or anything else to keep the heat down?

 

I have a the laptop elevated and a fan blowing air in under it.

Well the laptop doesnt get hot and I havent had a single problem with auto shotdown or anything.

The Core is clocked at 600 mhz at Preformance 3D and 440Mhz memory.

I dont really care if the card blows as I already have ordered a ATI 4650 card.

 

I played WoW during Burning Crusade and was one of the few US players to actually complete Sunwell. I did this all on an Asus G1 laptop with a Go7700 at 1680 1050 resolution the entire time. For raiding it was find, I never had issues as I would not have been able to do the above.
- Nvidia was a disaster though, ran WAY too hot and burned itself out twice during the time I owned it. I had the bottom off and laptop elevated with a fan blowing underneath. Nvidia _|_ you!

I don't know about now with Lich King as I haven't played over a year now.

 

M11x has the graphics power but CPU wise it is pathetic... also the screen is too small... ur better of buying a bigger laptop with a better screen.

 

Trust me, WoW is much more intensive. I used to be able to run vanilla WoW on a P4HT/6800GT decently well. Now, there isn't a chance in hell that will run fluently.

 

I was browsing one of my favorite webshops for good demo laptops and I found this one.

Toshiba Satellite A500D-111

It will be for the wife, which need a laptop for websurfing, light office work and some light gaming. It should not be able to run everything at the greatest settings but should be able to run it smoothly.

I am however a bit unsure about the cpu, as it is a AMD Tourion II M500. It has a ATI HD 4650 with 1gb DDR3 ram, so thats fine.

The price of this demo without scratsches and such is just 1½ times that of a netbook, so its a cheap machine.

 

CPU is not great (a bit below an Intel Core 2 Duo P7450), but at that price it's hard to resist!

 

I would thought the same but check G73 with world of warcraft, seems its strugling with WOW, could be isolated thing or drivers.

I agree with other posters into wow isnt that same old game that it was on release, i used to be fine on p4 3.0 + 6800, at least vanilla i was fine, strated to get tougher on TBC and just got worst in WOTLK (and i expect to get even worst on Cataclysm) even with the lower 25man raids (was 40 before), gradually i lowered in my CRT from 1600x1200 to 1024xXXX (dont remember), but was really bad till upgraded to i7 + GTX285, and still some encounters (anub or twins) bring down below 20fps in 25mans 1920x1200.

I play fine on any 25man raid on my laptop at 1366x768, if you really want a high res laptop i would suggest to go with nvidia, and probably a strong cpu, a high clock T9900/P9700 or i5 540m / i7 620m.

Read the following thread, Disappointed in WOW performance on ATI HD 4670 (studio xps 16), if i were to try to play at 1080p i would probably chose something like SAGER NP8690 and even then probably would chose the 1600x900 screen for more fluent gameplay. If you want a 720p res a g60 from bestbuy should do for $899 or even the G72 with 1600x900 + better cpu P8700 $999.

 

It's kinda strange how, WoW has become so resource heavy over the years.

The added games systems, attention to detail, amounts of objects, animations, spell effects, and size and detail of the world, have all added much, much higher requirements to the game.

Then you have external things, like UI Addons, insane amounts of players at one spot(AH), the massive increase in draw distance, and the high quality shadows, as well as frapsing if you want to make movies.
It really pushes the game up the ladder of what is needed.

Cataclysm seems to further increase the specs needed to play fluently. new water system(yay!)

 

It's very cpu intensive and only use 2 thread, so it will be bad on i7 laptop with slow clock rate. Win7 is also bad at scheduling between logic processes.

 

I'm starting to agree with this. WoW seems to be designed for Windows XP machines with extremely overclocked Core 2's or P4's and fast hard drives...

My G73 is like most others, I destroy everything in WoW but 25 mans and Dalaran bring me to 10 fps no matter what settings I change. I'm sure driver changes will help but I am seeing quite a few post on the Technical Support WoW forum concerning people with new i7 +W7 machines getting pathetic performance.

 

I believe the latest patch updated WoW so it will run on more than 2 cores.

 

Last patch removed cpu affinity mask, but it doesn't say increase number of threads. Before last patch the default mask was set to cpu0 and cpu1.

 

Not really... WoW is still only a single threaded application. The only thing it would be utilizing more than a single core on would be sound and addons. The game itself will only use a single core and this can be seen with while monitoring your CPU's where one core is at 100% while WoW is running and the rest are 0%-5% depending on background applications.

 

That's incredibly stupid.

A year ago when I played they claimed 11 million users, and still seems 11 million users.

11 million*$45+11 million * 15 * 12 = $2,475,000,000 for this year alone. Game is 5 years old...

Good to know where the money isn't going.

 

Hopefully SC2

 

There's good reason, and a fairly good chance, WoW isn't even in the double digits of millions in subscribers anymore. When was the last time Blizzard talked about subscriber numbers? And an increase at that? Not for awhile now. They still report to their shareholders they hold the largest MMO subscriber base in the world, which is true, but not as high as they're making it out to be.

Also, minus a good chunk of the revenue for thousands of things Activision Blizzard needs to pay for. A billion dollar company spends hundreds of millions every year, they're no different.

 

True, I red in the news not long ago that 70% of new players abandon WOW before reaching level 10 (I did at level 16 ). They intend to address this issue introducing newbie-friendly features in Cataclysm but, how are you supposed to buy Cataclysm if your characters are below level 10?

 

even if you reach 60 nobody wants you because your gear isnt up to par yet. this game used to be fun. not really anymore. its just a bunches of farmers now

 

About a week ago and they said they still had 11mil subscribers. You can find the "blue post" somewhere in the mmo-champion news.

 

One thing Blizzard doesn't let you know, in terms of player base, WoW is quite puny compared to Asian MMOs. WoW does have highest subscription base. But you would be surprised how much more money players spend in the item mall games.