x120e & WoW (World of Warcraft)

Just curious if anyone has any experience running World of Warcraft on a x120e? I'm considering getting one, but I'd like to get some first hand information if I could.

Thanks!

 

I would assume it would run well on low or maybe medium-low settings.

 

I will let you know on Thursday.

 

Awesome! Please do! It really bugs me not having 60fps so I tend to drop down quality to get it, but if I can't get things like projected textures it could be a problem in dungeons. I don't see myself doing raids with a laptop like this, but hell who knows.

 

In their review, Engadget says: "in WoW: Cataclysm, our gnome was prancing and jumping around the screen at 27fps with the resolution set at 1024 x 768."

So I guess 800x600 and good bit of special goodies turned down to get some decent fps in a raid or dungeon. But just a guess - too long since I travelled the lands as one of the Forsaken.

 

I wondered if they enabled DX11. I heard that for wow enabling is like Civ5 where the rendering technique improves frames rather than graphics. But than again I don't play wow, so don't actually know if its true.

 

It is only playable to me if it is at native resolution 1366x768 and at least med to low settings.

If you have to lower the native resolution to get playable acceptable framerates then it is not playable imo.

 

Same internal, Does it look playable to you?

YouTube - HP DM1Z - Zacate E-350 - World of Warcraft - Play Test

 

After looking at the review today for the X220, maybe that is going to be a better (yet more expensive) way to go...

 

I've had the notebook for about a day now, and can say that you'll want to use a faster HDD or SSD first. Also, based on my settings experiments, it seems the limiting factor on this platform might be CPU, rather than GPU, as there is much less of an impact on framerate as you move the sliders up and down. You can see this effect in benchmarks for Starcraft II as well...despite the higher 3D scores, the platform overall is lower than some other test units because the CPU isn't as beefy.

I've settled on a configuration that's along the lines of my former "netbook" WoW settings: make everything low except for the settings that make the game actually playable, like spell details (so you can see actions being taken clearly) and view distance (so you can see terrain/objects while flying). At this level, I'd say we're looking at playability for 5-mans, with some caveats if you want to do tough heroics or raids. In a raid environment, you get the "city effect" where the CPU has to chug through loading and presenting double the player textures, effects, and actions, which is traditionally what kills framerates.

With low-based settings (and this is contrary to WoW's recommended settings of "good") and good or high view distance and object distance, I do Cataclysm flightpaths at a pretty consistent 30 fps at 1280x720 windowed, which I say gives the x120e the "best WoW ultraportable under $500" title pretty handily. I've also been able to adjust wireless and other hardware settings to get 2 hours of Azeroth out of the 3-cell battery, in case you were wondering.

Happy questing!

 

There's no doubt that the X220 is a more powerful and stronger (in terms of build, display quality, battery life, etc) laptop, and it may even be a better deal if you consider what you're getting for the base price. For buyers with the pricing error, though, the X120e was easily 1/3 or even 1/4 the cost of an X220--so in that sense, I think it was a better deal

 

Thanks for the great reply, I really appreciate it!

 

Nothing beats a custom desktop PC in gaming!

If you wanna play WoW badly on High/Ultra settings then my solution is the best!

 

Ok.......

 

And this is from a long standing WoW player who quit 3 months ago after 5 years of playing the game.


Gaming rig for WoW won't cost you much nowaday and can last you for a long time if you ain't planning to play demanding future titles.

 

Yeah.
Well, my reaction is based on the fact that this thread is not about getting a killer portable WOW rig. It is about occasional wow access to accomidate light tasks in the game.

 

Exactly. I have a nice desktop at home, but sometimes I like to hang with the wife a bit rather than sit in my basement, hence, the need for a cheap laptop with decent graphics and battery life.

 

The x120e will play wow. If you want 60 fps then its not the laptop for you. If your fine wiht 15-40fps (still playable) then it would work well on low settings and probably native resolution. Now if you want something more powerful check out the m11x. I played wow until january so I know the demands of the new graphics. My m11x played the game between 40-60fps(in cities and raids too) with a few situations dropping it below 40, but the game NEVER got choppy or lagged. It played just as well as it did on my XPS at high settings and native resolution. If youre looking for the cheapest wow gaming machine the m11x is your laptop. I prefer the r1 as it doesnt have optimus and doesnt chance throttling with the i series chips.

 

Yeah, I hear that. I really don't even play wow anymore. Mostly because I can't stand sitting there after working at a PC all day.

The fact that I "could" run it on this would be a bit of a novelty, but when I was playing, a lot of times I would just log in to the auction house or farm mats and I don't need a i7-quad core to do that.

 

I've considered the m11x, and would probably jump all over it, the biggest problem is that I also need it for business use, and showing up to a meeting with that would probably raise some eyebrows.

 

I actually just ran it on a X120e as I ordered one to have on hand for work and fired it up. At 800x600 with pretty low settings in Org it was kinda sad, maybe playable for soloing, but I'd never use that in any kind of group fight

 

You don't need a killer one to play the game, heck you can even play wow on max settings on a medium-speced rig for killer price.

Well if you hangout and not sitting in basement there's no point in playing WoW in real life situations (i.e. above the basement).

 

Ill agree that for the 3 months I had it it was a bit awkward in meetings, but then again they all expected it as I am the systems administrator. You could turn lights off and get a black model and it would look pretty normal. Honestly the lunar silver didnt look too bad either. But yeah going into a meeting with a green glowing laptop got me a few stares.

Did you reformat it? That makes a world of difference.

 

Wow takes alot more to run these days. Max settings require a pretty beefy card to run decent as the shadows and spell effects are hard on GPUs.

 

After testing wow on X120e for a few days, my findings are that you can play WOW @ native resolution 1366x768 @ a steady FPS ranging from 55-65 frames per second while soling or leveling around elwyn forrest or outside Org with most settings to low and environment and ground clutter to fair. If you try and bump it all to good or high then the fps drops massively from 60fps to 20-25fps.

Going into the main cities like Stormwind or Org is different story however, even when everything is on low settings and @ 800x600, it was very laggy and fps was averaging around 5-10fps.

 

I hope an i5 X220 can run 1366x768 on medium at most places (45 - 60fps). I don't expect Org to have good fps, it doesn't even run well on my desktop but I'm not raiding in town

 

The Sandy Bridge iGPU works fine in WoW as long as you leave shadows and water effects on "Low", and turn off sunshaft effects. Shadows and water both kill performance, and sunshafts have a pretty big performance impact relative to the small graphical improvement they provide. Also make sure to leave multisampling (AA) off - the Intel HD 2000/3000 may support it (unlike previous Intel GPUs), but it's slow as hell.

Everything else you can leave on "Ultra", including texture filtering, view distance, and spell effects. Most of the settings other than shadows/water/view distance don't do much. Dropping view distance to "medium" gives you another big FPS boost in big outdoor areas, but I like to be able to see as far as possible.

On my desktop HD Graphics 2000 (which has half as many execution units as the HD Graphics 3000 in the mobile Sandy Bridge CPUs), I see a consistent 30fps or better, with the occasional slowdown if spell effects get intense.

The HD Graphics 3000 isn't quite twice as fast as the HD Graphics 2000 (more like 1.5-1.8x), so I would expect 40+ FPS all the time out of the HD Graphics 3000.

 

Just to clarify, the x120e can't run Cata dungeons with medium/good settings?

 

I got your message and I replied just now.

I forgot to include one more thing, the lag when you go to overcrowded city like Org is in Illidan and Blackrock because of the full population, I tested it on a medium pop server and fps went up dramatically to 20-25 in populated cities of course so this had something more to do with Bandwith rather than hardware.

If you are going to do 10/25m raids on x120e then you are out of lucky. You will be fine with 5man dungeon at native res as long as you don't go high on all settings, just around fair to good.

Low>Fair>Good>High>Ultra settings on Wow, just make sure shadow and sunshaft is low then it is playable

 

That made me chuckle, since putting two and two together "hang with the wife" obviously means "sit by the wife playing WoW"