I'm checking around for a laptop and I'm interested to know if people can correlate some information. I have a decent enough desktop that I mainly play on, but I'd like something I could take on the go. Since this will be supplemental I'm not looking for a powerhouse, just something that will load up and let me do some dailies or such. Right now I've got my eye on an HP with the following specs:
AMD Turion 64 X2
2.1 GHz
4 GB Ram
NVIDIA GeForce Go 7150M
Video RAM Up to 1071MB Total Available Graphics Memory
According to some research that graphics processor will sustain WoW. I'm not really looking to get much over 20 FPS with all the settings on low and 1024x 800 resolution. Thoughts would be appreciated on whether this would be worth the effort to purchase.
One of the nice things about WoW is that it's nicely scaleable along with computing power. I've mucked around with my Kuma 7750 (2 core K10) and AMD overdrive enough to know a bit about WoW's processor requirements. WoW is dual threaded, and is happy enough to max itself out on 2 cores at around 2ghz, so you should be fine there. (even though when given the option, it seems to prefer to be single-threaded at a bit over 3ghz. )
If you're looking to make it look pretty you probably need a high end laptop GPU however. My desktop's 4870 can handle 90+ FPS with everything maxxed out at 1080p, but of course it's much better than anything you can get in a laptop.
One of the nice things about WoW however is that if you turn the settings down far enough it'll run on almost any old piece of hardware. When I travel I play it on my 4 year old laptop (K8 3500+, ATi 200m, 1gb ram) and with the graphics on full low I it was pretty playable at my laptop's native 1280x800 resolution. Curently, with the processor at 2.31ghz, and a 26% OC on the GPU even battlefields are decently smooth on my old beast.