New Gaming Laptop - What do I need to know?

Kworn

Guys,

I am looking to invest a few quid in a gaming laptop but dont want to over spend.

All I want to do with it is put all setting to max in WOW and do a little photoshopping in Adobe photoshop. Maybe in the new future invest in some cool PC games.

What the best type of Laptop graphics card I am looking for in a laptop? I guess i would need as much ram as I can afford like 3-4GB and I'm not really bother by Blue-ray drives etc.

I have found this one which is under £500 pound http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_5920G_Laptop_LX.AQB0X.612/version.asp

Is this any good?

My current laptop cant handle WOW on even the lowest settings and it is starting to annoy me. I am also thinking of starting on WAR and would like the machine to be able to hadle this.

Thanks in advance

GrimReaper

Excluding Intel chipsets most graphic chipsets on laptops will run WoW pretty damn good. My Macbook Pro which has a 256MB 8600M GT chipset runs most games great. The only thing i'd advise against is running it maxed out with anti-aliasing, stick to max settings for WoW but don't bother with anti-aliasing.

General same thing with most other games, for example Oblivion and Fallout 3 run nicely on my laptop.

As long as the graphics chipset is AMD/ATI or nVidia you should be okay for running games, they obviously won't run as well as a desktop machine but they will run well enough.

And the true gaming laptops are pointless, you may as well be carrying around a lump of lead for all the portability they offer. Anyway, those type of laptops aren't in your price range.

Venkman90

I have decided on a macbook for the same reason, I "game" on my 360 so the macbook is just for WoW and any other Blizzard exclusives (D3, SC2). They are nice bits of kit and light if you do want to carry them about, well built etc...

A Windows based model will be cheaper of course, if you are adamant you want to save money on it then Dell do a good range, although the M1330 XPS has a known issue with the gfix card / mboard.

Kworn

Do you think if I downgrade my PC from Vista to XP WorldCraft will run quicker with the setting up?

Venkman90

It might, but if it won't run at all as is then it won't be much fun even with XP, I would go with a new one, you can be cheap (£400 ish) and get one that will run it just fine if you shop around

shadydentist

I would stick with Vista. New notebooks should have enough RAM to run Vista, and Vista comes with much better power management than XP.

Ravenid

Let me say this first. ACER dont make gaming laptops. Alienware and Rock make gaming laptops. Dell XPS kinda make gaming laptops (Not getting into that.) ACER make cheap laptops. But in this case it aint so bad

My laptop is the ACER 7720G. Its basically the big brother of the one you posted. 17" screen, Nvidia 9300G 256MB.

I use it to run Warhammer on Medium and the only issue I've found is that the vid card runs a bit hot. Now I've heard that thats down to the card itself but with some tweaking I've been able to up the fan speed and it can run for hours with lots of people onscreen with no slowdown (Only 3 Gig and running Vista should have mentioned.) And I've only had issues with overheating once.

I'd still buy a Rock or Alienware if I had the cash but its a good system for the price.