WoW Gaming Laptop

Hello everyone hopefully you can help me out real quick with a Gaming laptop for World of Warcraft.

1. What is your budget? 600-900 (alright if it goes over 1000 a little bit)

2. What is the size of the notebook that you are considering? As big as possible for gaming

3. What screen resolution do you want? Ummm....?

4. Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop? Portable

5. How much battery life do you need? A lot Im gonna be in Afghan so hopefully they will be able to ship it out to me

6. Do you want to play games with your laptop? If so then please list the games that you want to with the settings that you want for these games. (Low,Medium or High)? WoW on high or medium settings

7. What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo / Video editing,watching movies, Etc.) Video chatting

8. How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need? 4gb

9. If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post their links. use what you got

10. How long do you want to keep your laptop? 1-2 years

11. What kind of Optical drive do you need? DVD ROM/Writer,Bluray ROM/Writer,Etc ? I dont want bluray

12. Please tell us about the brands that you prefer to buy from them and the brands that you don't like and explain the reasons. I dont care

13. What country do you live in? USA but deployed in Afghan right now

14. Please tell us any additional information if needed. a full keyboard with number pad, no vista

1. A decent gaming laptop starts at about $1,100

2. More if ya want big screen

5. As performance goes up, battery life by necessity goes down

8. Id say 250 GB minimum

I'd grab this bugger for $1,172 ..... gonna need $90 for an OS tho if ya can't get thru military

http://www.pro-star.com/index.cfm? [...] del=P151HM

It's loaded w/ Sandy Bridge, has 8 GB memory, 500 GB HD, i7-2630QM, GTX 460M w/1.5GB GDDR5, X Max. DVD±R/RW Writer/Reader / 4X Max. +DL Super-Mulit Drive , 8 cell Li-Ion battery, Integrated 802.11 b/g/n + Bluetooth, Built-In 2.0M Pixels Digital Video Camera, Built-In Fingerprint Reader, Built-In Gigabit Ethernet LAN, Built-In 9-IN-1 Flash Memory Reader(MMC/RSMMC/MS/MS Pro/MS DUO/SD/Mini-SD/SDHC/SDXC), 1 IEEE-1394a Fire Wire, 2 USB 2.0 Ports, 2 USB 3.0 Ports, 1 eSATA Port, 1 HDMI Output, 1 DVI-I Port, 1 Kensington Lock Port, Built-in Microphone, 2 Speakers and 1 Sub-Woofer, 4 Audio Jacks for Headphone, Microphone-In, S/PDIF-Out, and Line-In, 100/240V Autoswitch AC Adapter

ASUS N53J Entertainment Laptop $950
Core i5-460M CPU & 1920x1080 15.6" LCD & GeForce GT 425M graphics with Optimus technology - increases battery life by shutting down the GT 425M and using the Intel HD Graphics GPU when the stronger video card isn't needed.
GT 425M will handle WoW on medium settings.
With any gaming laptop you're going to sacrifice battery time for power. Optimus technology balances that a bit.

You would be able to upgrade to 8GB of RAM, but only by removing the 2x2GB sticks and replacing them with 2x4GB sticks of RAM. Not exactly a cost effective performance upgrade since you get no 'real' performance advantage over the already included 4GB.
The benefit of CPU and GPU upgrades is also questionable in my mind. The cost to upgrade (staying within the same family of CPU for example) doesn't really get you a cost effective performance boost. IMO, you need to upgrade into the next generation of CPU/GPU to get an upgrade that makes sense and that option isn't usually available to laptop owners.

A better strategy is keeping the laptop till you feel it's not meeting your requirements. Then you can either pass it along to a family member or sell it and use the proceeds for your next laptop. The Blu-Ray player might make it a more attractive re-sale choice for the next owner.

Not for WoW or most other laptop usages.
There are some video and photographic (Photoshop) editing programs that can make good use of extra RAM. And if you're going to be using multiple virtual machines with VMware 8GB of RAM will sure come in handy.
Even there it's not like having 4GB of RAM leaves you unable to use those programs effectively.

also looked onto toshiba and made one

# Intel® Core i3-370M Processor (2.40GHz)
# Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium 64-bit
# 4GB DDR3 1066MHz SDRAM (2048MBx2)
# 500GB HDD (5400rpm, Serial ATA)
# No Secondary Hard Drive Installed
# NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 330M with 1GB GDDR3 discrete graphics
# DVD SuperMulti (+/-R double layer) drive
# Glossy Black Keyboard
# No Bluetooth (No Antenna)
# Lithium-Ion Battery (6-cell, 48Wh)

Just dont know if it will play WoW at high settings

Do you think i should upgrade anything for better performance right now its only at $879.
I did upgrade the Processor to the i5 for more multi-tasking capabilities

hmm dont think so which part will need to get changed to do that?

That is a really unusual screen resolution.
I wonder if games support that resolution, or maybe you'd need to use 1440x900?

Jeezzzzzzz........that sucker has a 18.4" LCD.

What screen resolutions does WoW support?

I found another source.
What is missing is 1680x945. And I would guess the same is true for a lot of games.
You could either run 1440 x 900 or 1366 x 768 in a window or run one of those full screen.
That would cause the video card to do extra work to figure out what pixels to use to make 1680x945 pixles act like 1440x900 or 1366x768.
It would cut into your FPS performance a bit.

WoW Supported Resolutions:
1280 x 800 (16:10)
1440 x 900 (16:10)
1680 x 1050 (16:10)
1920 x 1200 (16:10)
2560 x 1600 (16:10)
1024 x 576 (16:9)
1280 x 720 (16:9)
1366 x 768 (16:9)
1920 x 1080 (16:9)

God why is it always the graphics card that gives me a hard time i know WoW doesnt rely on it that much, its harder on the memory. Just need to find one that gets me about 60fps while raiding

Well guess I'll keep looking around for more laptops checking to see if I can find a good one for a great price. Thanks for all your help WR2 and the others that have put in their advice

Alright i was looking at my laptops Windows Experience Index it was a 3.3, is there a way to figure out what WEI is need to run WoW smoothly at medium high settings?

Have a look at these. I think the very first one on the list (Sager NP5160) should be ample for running your WoW games and it is only $770USD (more for a larger hard drive).
http://www.xoticpc.com/custom-gami [...] 1_162.html
Sager is supposed to have excellent build quality, the laptop is light and it supposed to have a battery life of up to 5 hours.

-Klosteral

Probably not. The GT 325M video card is about 18% less powerfulthan the GT 330M.
The GT 425M is about 2%, maybe 6%, more powerful than the GT 330M.

Any or those, including the GT 325M, is adequate for WoW on medium setting with decent frame rates. ~60FPS might not be possible though.