W520 and Gaming

Please share your experiences with your Thinkpad W520 and gaming. It is understood that the nVidia Quadro GPUs aren't as good for gaming as they are for productivity and workstation type applications. However, they should still be able to handle most gaming, especially the 2000M.

I have the 2000M and have Steam and all my games installed on an external HDD connected through the eSata port. I am having issues running most games without lag, especially Crysis and Battlefield 2, even on Medium and Low quality settings. I have relied on nVidia Optimus to assign the discrete GPU to Steam games, and even set it manually in BIOS.

Has anyone else experienced poor performance for gaming? This is not really what I purchased the laptop for, or I would have gotten an Alienware, but I would expect better.

And, according to this, I should be seeing better performance:
NVIDIA Quadro 2000M - Notebookcheck.net Tech

 

You should be seeing a LOT better performance.

Check my sig below for my system specs... All my games are installed on one of the SSDs.

Crysis 2 will run at hardcore settings at about 1366 x 768 absolutely no problem. Played the entire game like this and it was awesome. Higher resolutions will cause noticeable lag...

SC2 - high detail settings and FHD resolution - no problem.

DA-O: max settings at FHD - no problem.

L4D2 - easy for this system at pretty much max settings and FHD.

Oblivion - a bit older game, but pretty taxing at max settings: I can run it at FHD and almost max settings: I have to turn vegetation "distance" to something somewhat reasonable when outside, but inside, not a problem at any setting.

Oh ya - for work, this system absolutely rocks for Solidworks. The SSDs are highly, HIGHLY recommended if you don't have one (or more!). I was originally all set to get the latest and greatest SATA3 drives, but ended up with a couple of SATA2 drives (intel 320 and intel 310) and frankly couldn't be happier with the system performance. Sure, it might get a tad faster with SATA3 drives, but overall the system is sooo snappy and the really important apps (i.e. Solidworks) run so well, that I'm pretty stoked on how it's working right now (even Crysis2 level load times were great - about 10-15 seconds typically). This is the best money I've spent on a computer system PERIOD.

Good luck!

 

I'm thiniking it's slower b/c your games are running off of an esata which I think is slower than just having a sata connection inside.

 

Crysis 2 load times are pretty indifferent towards storage speed; it was 15 seconds for me on my T400's Scorpio Black too.

Anyone tried overclocking the 2000M?