Laptop running games poorly, but good enough specs?

The GTX 550m is not that great of a GPU. You are playing some very demanding games which isn't helping. Strictly speaking, the 550m falls below the minimum requirements for Witcher 2 and Battlefield 3. They call for an 8800GT/Radeon HD 3870 as a minimum, the 550m is slower than those cards and is more equivalent to cards even older than the 8000 series GeForce cards like the 7800GTX or Radeon X1950 XT.

Skyrim you are getting about what you should. As for Planetside 2, the game just came out, it may need some more optimization, or some more work needs to be done on the drivers to get decent performance. The minimum requirements for Planetside 2 are very interesting, with the nvidia requirements much, much lower than the AMD requirements. It's also possible that the 550m is below minimum spec for that game.

For most of those games, you're going to need a new laptop with a considerably better GPU if you want good performance. The GTX 550m is really only suitable for light gaming.

aw what a shame... thanks for the reply !

Hi  

GAMING LAPTOP = OXYMORON

All the best Brett  

What res? when you say "low settings" are they the presets? Turn off AA completely and disable shadows. Those are the 2 hardest settings.

The 550m is almost exactly comparable to a desktop GT 240...according to the benchmarks on notebookcheck

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Computer-Games-on-Laptop-G...

Did you know that you can OC with afterburner? I have a 525m on my laptop and it clocks to 815Mhz core clock EASILY. results will vary, but my 525m is performing better than your 550m. The 525m is actually exactly the same as your 550m but with lower clocks.

Ironically, you having the quad core with slower clocks than the dual cores is not helpful in all likelihood. Skyrim esp. likes fast CPU's (mine is a i7-2720 which turbos to 3.3Ghz)

Anyway, as stated by the other posters curb your expectations. Run @ 1366x768 or so for modern games. (resident evil 5 plays acceptably @ 1080, depends on the graphics engine)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VYFi4FNV2o (oc'ed 525m res evil 5 1080)

JUICE YOUR GPU (mind the temperatures, I applied MX-4 TIM before my OC's)