Sorry for another boring spec post, but you guys are always clued up!
I’m looking into buying a new laptop as had to get rid of the desktop due to space issues as selling up and moving in with GF.
I play casually (Questing, 5 man dungeons and BGs) with my brother I’m looking for something slim, sleek and well built that will run shadowlands. Needs to last around 2 years before we get a new place and I can get a desktop again
It must come from curry’s as I can get money off through a work scheme, here’s one I’ve found.
What do you think? Reviews all look good but it’s the lower spec one
It honestly depends on what you are planning to do with the laptop.
Keep in mind that WoW is very poorly optimized and your results in how well it will run with certain settings will vary. That being said the GPU looks fine, you won’t be able to play Shadowlands on anything higher than [6] and you may want to turn your viewing distance and shadow quality down, that’s not a problem for questing or 5-man dungeons however.
A friend of mine had some issues with his GTX 1650 Ti, if you run into these issues I would contact the seller:
Ingame Stutter.
Random Lag Spikes
Really slow loading screens [Sometimes, but especially in cities like Stormwind/Boralus]
Textures - Characters - Objects can take time to load.
CPU also looks to be fine, I would be wary of integrated AMD processors but it looks like you are not going that route.
Would mever recommend 8gb ram to be honest. It just feels aweful and doesn’t give enough for games really, windows uses quite abit as it is. The rest of it is kinda ok, should get 60 fps on a low scale. 1650ti is equivalent worse then a 6 year old mid tier card (a 970 is 20% better, and that’s oldddd). The CPU is fine and equivalent to a 4790k (again 6 years old, but still decent for this day and age).
If you can afford it try get 16gb ram and a bit better card. It’ll run wow though for sure, just low settings and no chance of 60fps in towns, world bosses, probs even raids. What kinda price you looking to pay?
You get a lot of improved performance, but keep in mind that it comes at a price.
I personally would never go for a laptop as you’re essentially limiting yourself with the upgrade path.
If you have a little more money I would follow Chocoh his suggestion and look for something that’s a bit more expensive, but will also give you more wiggle room in the future.
I really really really advise against AMD laptop CPU’s for WoW.
I’ve done it a bunch of time. They just can’t handle the game in grouped content. Granted it’s been like 5 years but I have bad personal experiences with AMD CPUs. Even my first desktop had AMD and it wasn’t that great.
I ended up buying an intel of similar benchmark, the i5 4960k and it runs circles around the AMD in WoW.
If you can go for an intel i5 or i7 I highly recommend you go for that instead.
Don’t base your recommendation on 5 years ago. AMD is blasting Intel big time. I’m using an AMD CPU myself and it works perfect.
More and more laptops switching to AMD because it gives better performance per watt (and in general).
If anything, I’d recommend not using Intel. My recent work laptop has had a bunch of issues with coil whine coming from the igpu for example. Not to mention the boatload of CVE patches that constantly degrade performance on Intel cpus.
As others have said, beware 8gb of ram. It’s not much these days.
Although many laptops have a free memory slot and you may be able to add some later.
In theory the GPU is quite adequate; I run on a 1060 which is similar ballpark. Mobile versions are always slower however, so don’t expect miracles.
Citation needed… I see no evidence that WoW’s client is poorly optimised. Aside from one or two specific raid encounters, I get a smooth 60fps everywhere on modest graphics hardware.
Going to caution that this advice is 5 years out of date then You are most likely thinking of the old Piledriver architecture, which was a bit naff. The latest Ryzen line are very good, and a lot of prosumers are favouring them over Intel.
I should probably have specified that WoW is a pretty badly optimized game in terms of engine and overall performance, meaning you’ll get fps drops in certain places no matter what kind of specs you have.
First of all, it all depends on what budget you have.
But ill never advice someone to buy new laptop with intent to be futureproof (2+ years) that comes with 4gb gpu and 8gb ram.
Next important thing is mobo, hoe much ram can u fit in and how much is build in (if mobo allows it u can buy 8gb laptop and upgrade for cheap) , also storage, i wont buy anything without ssd, or at least chance to add an ssd ( and ssd’s are quite comon issue when it comes to laptops and upgrades…)
Usually these laptops come with a 60hz 1920x1080 screen, it’s still the default resolution afaik. I have 1920x1200 + 1920x1080 at the same time, so OP will be fine. Considering the goal is to buy a new laptop, I’m also assuming there’s no 4k screen going to be attached as there wouldn’t be an existing system that can handle this.
I run all settings on 7 and some higher (CPU intensive lower) and get 80~100 fps in BfA zones despite “only” having 3GB yes, more is better, but not worth to specifically invest in for the next 2 years. Shadowlands won’t suddenly increase the GPU requirements, that’s a next expac thing.
I have few friends playing on laptop and i realy dont wanna say u are laying but it hard to believe u run 100 fps with graphics on 7 with 3gb gpu only, might be lower resolution tho, but still my friend with 2060 has like 140 or so, on full hd
Reason for testing: massive FPS drops in 25v25 and 40v40 PvP when I have plater enabled. So I was testing if disabling the max foreground FPS option would make a difference with vsync off.
That’s literally worlds apart from the first one you posted. Will have absolutely no issue with this one! Will handle wow max settings 144fps nicely (for 300quid extra, it’s like 2-3x better lol) will last many years!
I couldn’t find any performance changes disabling these options so far. I did some tweaking in Plater, disabling the majority of buffs, and not showing plates for pets & minions, this made my Wintergrasp 35v35 go from 17fps to ~30fps. Additionally I’ve set the target FPS to 70 so that spell effects get reduced faster, no difference either.
I’m deffo CPU bottlenecked at this point, might try again with SMT now that I’m using the AMD powerplan. For the record, AMD Ryzen5 2600 is my CPU, with 16GB ram clocked at 2933mhz
You are most likely thinking of the old Piledriver architecture, which was a bit naff. The latest Ryzen line are very good, and a lot of prosumers are favouring them over Intel.
yes, more is better, but not worth to specifically invest in for the next 2 years. Shadowlands won’t suddenly increase the GPU requirements, that’s a next expac thing.