Laptop vs. desktop for WoW

Games, Gaming & Hardware
1

Hi there

Come the beginning of next semester, I’m going to be working away from home. I’ll have a room to myself at the place I’ll be staying at, and I’ll be needing a new pc to play WoW during the week days. For the weekends I already have my desktop at home.
I have an old laptop (over 10years old) that it’s on its last legs…So I need to update!

My big question atm is: laptop or desktop?
If I go for laptop, I’m planning to buy one to use it with an external monitor btw.

My pros and cons atm:

Laptop:
PRO - laptop are…well… portable!!! Easy to carry it around anywhere
CON - buck for buck they are more expensive than a Desktop. So you’d have less performance than a conventianal desktop. Very hard to upgrade: apart from adding RAM and maybe another SSD, there’s not much else you can do. They are also relatively easy to steal.

Desktop:
PRO - more powerful. Very easy to upgrade to keep relevant. Harder to steal than a laptop.
CON - stationary. Much more expensive. Can’t move around.

I wish I could buy an end tier rtx 5070 or 5080 laptop where I live, but it seems stores completely skipped the 5070 versions and the ones with 5080s go anywhere from 4k euros to 5k euros. I can’t afford that! But I can get a top tier Desktop for around 2.5k with monitor included).

My options are:

LAPTOPS

for 1399€

  • Lenovo LOQ Gaming (9 GEN) 15ARP9-768 15.6" Luna Grey
  • AMD Ryzen™ 7 7435HS 8-Core, 3.10 GHz with Turbo up to 4.5 GHz, 20 MB Cache
  • RAM:* - 24GB (2x12GB) DDR5-4800MHz
  • 2 x Slots SO-DIMM (occupied) can expand up to 32GB
  • Screen: 15.6" FHD (1920x1080) IPS 300nits Anti-glare, 100% sRGB, 144Hz, G-SYNC®
  • GPU: NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 4070 8GB GDDR6, Boost Clock 2175MHz, TGP 115W

for 1599€

  • Lenovo Legion 5i 16IRX9-187 16" Luna Grey
  • CPU:* Intel® Core™ i7-14650HX 16-Core, with Turbo up to 5.20 GHz, 30 MB Cache
  • Chipset: Intel® HM770
    • RAM:** * 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5-5600MHz
  • 2 x Slots SO-DIMM (occupied) can expand up to 64GB
  • Screen: 16" WQXGA (2560x1600) IPS 350nits Anti-glare, 100% sRGB, 165Hz, Dolby® Vision™, G-SYNC®, Low Blue Light
  • GPU: Intel® UHD Graphics + NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 4070 8GB GDDR6, Boost Clock 2175MHz, TGP 140W

to both these laptop, add 219€ for a curved monitor Asus TUF Gaming VG27WQ3B VA 27" QHD 16:9 180Hz FreeSync

So, we would have 1618€ for the LOQ combo and 1818€ for the Legion combo

VERSUS

DESKTOP
for: 2281€
CPU :AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D “Zen 5” 8-Core 4.7GHz c/ Turbo 5.2GHz 104MB Cache SktAM5
GPU: Sapphire AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT “RDNA 4” Pulse 16GB GDDR6
RAM: UDIMM G.SKILL Trident Z5 Neo 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5-6000MHz (AMD Expo) CL30 (30-38-38-96) 1.35V
MB: Motherboard ATX Gigabyte X870 Gaming X WiFi 7 SktAM5
Case: Extended-ATX Corsair Frame 4000D
PSU: ATX Corsair RM850x Shift Series 850W 80 Plus Gold Full Modular
SSD: SSD M.2 2280 Samsung 990 Pro 2TB MLC V-NAND NVMe PCIe Gen 4.0x4
Cooler: Air Cooler CPU Arctic Freezer 36 120mm CO

Add 219€ for the monitor and the total is a whooping 2500€

What do you guys think?
Is it worth spending around 700€ for the desktop?

2

Hey!

I’ll just give you my 2 cents:

I’ve been playing wow for around 20 years now, and I have always used a laptop, due to my job where I travel a lot. I try to pug to all 10’s done every season, and pug the current raids on HC at some point, counting myself as the average player in wow.

For the longest time I’ve been using Macbook Pro’s to do this (worse performance, but long battery life and the sturdy build quality has served me well). However the past few years I’ve been using Windows machines due to the lower costs of these, and my Razer Naga having issues.

Currently I am using a Lenovo Legion 5, with a Ryzen 7 and an RTX 4070, very similar specs to the ones you’re looking at. I have all my settings maxed out, haven’t bothered changing them, run at 100% render scale (this has a 1440p monitor), and aside from the obvious frame drop (40-50FPS) in Dornogal, it has no issues with running >100FPS during raids, M+ and BG’s.

I will add that my previous laptop, a DELL G15 with an intel 11800 chip and a RTX 3060, also had no issues doing the same thing at 1080p.

In short, I think laptops are great for wow, and my current one seems to run every other game I’ve tried at max settings without issues as well.

Mind you, I don’t use an external monitor, or keyboard, the Legion has a great screen and the keyboard is perfectly fine.

Hope this helps, good luck on your search!

3

If you want to raid at the highest FPS currently possible (the 9800X3D is the fastest CPU but does still drop below 60 in raids sometimes), then yes there is no other way.

Also don’t forget that gaming notebooks tend to overheat in summer or get very loud :slight_smile:

Judging by your FPS in Dornogal, you won’t even come close to 100 FPS in a current raid.
Especially not 20man or bigger raid size.

I’m on a 5800X3D and got about 70-80+ FPS on Blackhand, a full server.
I drop to the 30s in a 30man raid, 40s in a 20man usually, depending on the boss (one armed bandit is kinda the worst atm).

Like i said, a 9800X3D, which is about 50% faster in WoW than my CPU, also drops below 60 in a full raid or 20man mythic.

No offense but you obviously don’t play many demanding games, cause a 8GB GPU cannot max out alot of games even in 1080P anymore.

4

Thank you!

5

Hey cheerful!

Fortunately I’m not blind, I do M+, get my 10’s done, I did the HC raid last season, usually in 30 man pugs, I never see my FPS dropping below 100 in these situations, could get much better framerate if I’d tweak the settings a bit, but hey, it’s Dornogal, who cares.

No offense taken btw, I try a lot of games, aside from Cyberpunk, where it stugles to get to 20FPS @1440p with max settings, this laptop is doing just fine with everything else :slight_smile:

Have a great day, don’t assume you know everything better, it’s ok if you don’t!

P.S.: Laptops always get hot, overheating though… mwah, last time I went to the sahara me and my buddies could play COD and BF just fine on deployment! If it thermal throttles, turn down the settings! Here in Germany it’s doing just fine as it is. Laptops have come a long way in the last few years.

6

The key takeaway here is “i never SEE”, cause if you never look infight, you will never see your FPS drop to the 30s or less :slight_smile:

I don’t have to assume anything because even the fastest CPU on this planet can not even hold close to 100 FPS in a 30man raid.

So either you have a special CPU from the future, or… you should probably look at your FPS after pull.
Try one armed bandit 30man for example.

7

Sure thing buddy, you are right, I am wrong.

May the anonymity of the internet be forever with you to aid you in your crusade to argue with everyone, in the name of your self proclaimed truth.

Once again, have a nice day!

8

Just saying but the burden of proof lies in your hands.

9

You’ve won, I admit defeat, what more is there to gain for you with yet another demeaning reply filled with entitlement?

10

What entitlement?
All i said was that it’s impossible to have 100 FPS in a 30man raid even on the best hardware you can buy atm.
What do i gain from that?
You are the one who says he has these unachievable FPS in a 30man raid and even on a Notebook CPU that is like half as fast as a 9800X3D.

I just don’t want people to read your posts and think what you are saying is actually achievable and give them a false sense of what is possible in this game with certain hardware and what not.

Once in a while there is someone like you claiming the things you do, but they never proof it, never :slight_smile:

On the other hand i’ve been posting here for like a decade and i always give proof of my claims, like for example my post about the bugged renderscale (posted lots of screenshots with detailed OSD of all components etc.).

11

Alright, I’ll take the bait:

Entitlement: You proclaim things as if they are gospel, asking me to proof it, where you provide none, an easy way to put another man down.

People reading my post: It was my first, and don’t you worry, last, try to help someone with a question I ask myself every year or so when I’m about to get a new computer.

Once in a while: Once in a while someone would just like to share their own experience in an attempt to help another person with their question.

Posting for a decade: Experience or time doing things does not equal expertise, ask any operating staff in a hospital, or closer to myself, and aircraft mechanic.

Want proof? I’ve spend over a year deployed in several places around the globe, mostly desert like climates. My laptops have always been fine there, even when gaming, since 2010 up until recently? Want to join me to a warzone so you can see for yourself? I dare you. So your claim about overheating in the summer is a rather bold assumption/exaggeration, based on nothing other then what you, yourself, are convinced off. Why don’t you support this statement with any proof, please enlighten me?

FPS: I’ve just adjusted some settings in wow, based on Quazzii’s video on FPS, and now rolling with a steady 80 FPS in Dornogal? Want proof? DM me, I’ll stream it for you. As for raids? Same thing, I’ll stream if for you, happily! Will my FPS drop on pull when theres a sudden large load on the CPU? Sure. Will it come right back up after a second or 5. Yes. Will it affect the ability to play the game? No. And you know this is true, just arguing for the sake of arguing. Wait don’t even take my word for it, watch some streams, I’m not the only one.

Before you come back with a witty reply based on years of arguing on the internet: Don’t bother. If you’re really nitpicky, then yea, I was lying about my laptops performance, because yes, some seconds of the day, it does drop ever so slightly, to then perform just fine again. See, I admitted it, I accept defeat.

Good lord, just let a man help another man with a question. I don’t need to prove anything, I’m literally just trying to help another guy making a decision on what to get himself, you didn’t have to argue over something that happens 0.1% of the time you actually play the game.

Have a good evening, I mean it, just please try to stop putting others down and calling them liars and telling them to prove stuff, while making unfounded claims without any proof yourself.

12

That’s exactly what i did, watch streams by people with a 9800X3D or YT videos.
That CPU is about 50% faster than my 5800X3D in WoW and comparing my FPS to theirs shows exactly this, so i know the numbers are right.

I Know Quazzii’s and all the other “optimisation” videos on YT and no matter what you do there is no magic setting that will give you high FPS in a 30man raid because no hardware can handle it.
Why? Because the core game logic (+combatlog + addons) all run on one and the same CPU thread. Yes ONE.
Remember the game’s engine is from before 2005. Dual cores were rare back then.
Did they upgrade the engine with alot of GPU features over the years? Sure.
Did they add multithreading to the CPU stuff i mentioned above? Not really, just for loading/streaming data.

Btw, Quazzii and co, also have some wrong information in their videos that actually causes your FPS to drop (depending on the hardware and settings).
Remember the renderscale setting i mentioned as bugged?
This has been the case since DF and Blizzard hasn’t fixed it yet.
If you set the renderscale to anything other than 100%, you will lose performance (over setting 100%, alot more than you should).
I called him out in the comments under that video and in the latest one he talks about it being bugged, so at least something.

Sure, i’ll take you up on that. Just upload a bossfight in a 30man grp, i’ll even accept 25 and show us that your FPS go right up to ~100 after a short drop :slight_smile:

He was asking for advice on purchasing new hardware for WoW.
Now if you tell him that you get ~100 FPS in a 30man raid and he makes his choice on that comment, then finds out it’s not even close, do you think he will be happy?
The good lord won’t help him then either.

How can i proof that you don’t get the performance you are claiming?
All i can do is post videos from WoW players with the best hardware available and show that even they can’t get the numbers you claim to get with much less powerful hardware.

So here you go.

As a fellow huntard i chose these 2 examples you should be familiar with from last season:

In the Heroic kill video he still had a 7800X3D, the mythic kill of Ansurek is with the 9800X3D.

Now remember that your CPU is probably half as fast (since you have only mentioned Ryzen 7 and no specific model i can only guess, but no notebook Ryzen comes close to these 2 X3D CPUs in WoW).

As you can see even with the 9800X3D he can barely hold 100+ FPS and has drops to around 60.
This is with only 20man (mythic).
With 50% more people your FPS will also decrease by alot (50% more combatlog calculations + all the addon calculations on top).

Before you ask about the GPU (which doesn’t matter since it’s barely being used because of the high CPU-limit in a raid), it’s a 4090.

I hope that you can now better understand why i’m arguing with you here at all :slight_smile:

1 Like
13

Wow you actually took the time to make sure the job was done didn’t you, even though I have admitted defeat, chapeau! I love how you assume that I know literally nothing about anything at all, which plays in nicely to my claim of you feeling entitled.

My render scale is set to 100%, thanks. Quazzii mentioned to play around with it, I did, and noticed that it didn’t affect my FPS.

There is a notebook that can outperform all of the aforementioned CPU’s, it’s made by Apple.

It’s well known that WoW favors single core performance, since that’s what we used in 2005. Also my wife’s 970m would indeed suggest that GPU’s are not very important for wow, as it works fine.

It seems like you haven’t mentioned the overheating issues, presumably because you can’t prove it? I doubt you’ll come to the desert with me to verify my claims?

I’m not recording anything, because simply put, I don’t know how, or care for it. I’ll stream it for you, so you can tell me in person that, perhaps, you went into this with a bit to much aggression. I don’t look to get any gratification or validation from anyone, but you, personally. Don’t forget that logging, addons, weakauras, recording, etc. all cut into CPU usage. I only use details and DBM and I’m often at 4% CPU usage just with that. On the mythic kill you rarely see FPS dropping below 100, I would wager that the average FPS is well above that, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. I can only verify Azors pc specs on the mythic kill, assuming the twitch stuff is still what he uses, as I’m sure you’ve also seen. In effect, this proves absolutely nothing, aside from the fact that his pc is able to run WoW >100FPS. Now lets look at the specs between that and mine, it’s able to single core run at almost the same clock speed, with boost, which I do, and even without it’s on average 39% slower then his. Now with him frequently sitting around 140 FPS, that leaves me with somewhere around 85 FPS, at max everything, 20m raid. Factor out the addons, logging, recording, streaming, half of a 30m pug on HC doing literally nothing aside from the opening burst to stress my system out, and suddenly I think, even without proof, that my 100FPS claim isn’t that far out of the realm of possibilities, is it? Lets say I can steadily hit 90, still quite impressive for a notebook, nothing your eyes or brain will register, and some room for future game updates to stay well above 60. I’m sure you’ve got something to debunk this, but whatever…

EDIT: Just looked at your 5800x3d, which has a 19% worse single core clock speed then my 7840HS, and compared to the 9800x3d, I’m losing out, on average by 39%. So your 50% less powerful claim is off. Should I dismiss anything you say too from now on, because you had you numbers off by a little bit? Even though, as a figure of speech when mentioning 50%, I understood you perfectly fine. I wasn’t going to mention this stuff, but since you’re trying your very best to discredit me, here we are…

The OP would be happy with his choice of laptops, either of them, it’s not worth the extra cash to drop on a desktop that’s not mobile, if you need a laptop.

On a more personal note, no I don’t understand why you’re arguing with me, I didn’t ask for it, nor did anyone else you ever argued with, I would dare to say with confidence. Leave the subject, stop harassing me. Start worrying about more important things in life, other then me helping another dude making a choice on what to buy, just because I claimed to get good FPS with ones everyday sort of playing WoW. Thanks.

14

Playing on laptop, of course with a separate keyboard and mouse.

Less Power Consumption is also not bad, I don’t want a power hungry machine, since I play a lot :slight_smile:

15

I’m not taking the bait for this “the eyes can only see X frames per second” thing :slight_smile:
Just so you know, if the FPS drop below ~90 in WoW it feels sluggish to me on my 144Hz display (G-Sync on).
30-50 in 30man raids feels really bad.
I would upgrade to the 9800X3D in an instant, but tbh i don’t want to “rebuild” the whole PC.
I’ll just build a new platform when the next or thereafter X3D CPUs arrive in 1-2 years.
I’m not progress raiding anymore, so it doesn’t affect me that much when pugging.

Totally ignoring that the main adavantage of the X3D CPUs in gaming and especially WoW is the 96MB of extra Level 3 Cache (which your CPU does not have, so your comparison is off).

I’ll just leave this here for you before i tap out of this conversation;

Take a look at the 5700X, same 4,5Ghz Clockspeed, threads, RAM, but the 5800X3D is 39% faster because of the cache.
Which is actually insane. Like the difference between a whole generation in IPC is usually 15% ish, max like 25%.
This is in the same generation.
The jump from a 5800X3D to a 7800X3D is like 25ish % as i said and that is taking into account the jump from DDR4 to 5 and also a big increase in clockspeeds (4,5 to 5Ghz boost).
The 9800X3D has some bigger IPC improvements than the 7th gen.

In general, you can’t just look at pure singlecore performance when comparing CPUs.
Look at other gaming benchmarks and you will see, if the game benefits from the cache, the X3D CPUs destroy even the 14900K.
It’s that huge of a factor.
Also look under Quazzii’s optimization video in the comments, there’s so many people praising the X3D CPUs, saying how big of an improvement it was over their Intel or non X3D AMD CPU.

Anyways take care in your dessert, enjoy the game, have fun :slight_smile:

16

First of all, let me thank you for finally admitting defeat by denouncing science, and not arguing the actual points I brought up on things you know you’re wrong about, but instead pointing out something else that is irrelevant as I’ve been purposefully mentioning user averages across the board with the same hardware.

Lets not forget to mention the cornerstone of your argument, single core performance, which you now claim is not that important anymore.

All in all, this is a huge win for me.

I will keep taking care in the desert, or on the eastern front if needed be, to make sure you (and others) can keep enjoying the privilege of making pointless arguments on the internet. Or make supposedly funny comments with a clown emoji on a topic of actual concern to many players, instead of trying to help solve it.

17

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