advice on gaming laptop

hi all.

i have a friend selling his laptop. the specs are below:

17.3 display
Intel I7 quad core at 1.76ghz with turbo boost goes to 2.8ghz with hyperthreading so its a total of 8 cores.
8gb ddr3 ram
500gb drive
blueray player
dolby home theater speakers  with virtual surround sound
it has a dedicated 1gb video card (ati)

He's offering this laptop at what i feel is a good price, but since i'm mainly buying it to play guild wars 2, wanted to get some advice from the community on weather or not it would be a good system for playing. Im looking for something that will allow me to (finally) enter wvw, or at the least, have less culling during Prissy's guild bounty & map complete events.

any help is appreicated.

thanks!

8gb ram is decent but you probably wont be able to play at best settings. I have an ASUS laptop very close to that in spec and I was playing GW2 without issues and at a decent framerate.

I run an asus Republic of Games laptop, the specs that I have on it are under those specs. I am not able to run at high graphics but there are very few times that I have issues. Other then the lag spike when everyone is fighting a Dragon, but other then that I get decent FPS. I only have 4gb and the game runs fine for me. I only got the laptop for GW2. I think you will have a great time should you ge this.

What is the specs on the HD? That will be your bottleneck for loading screens, if it is only a 5400RPM... Might consider slapping a SSD in there.

thanks for the help - for the price he's offering, (under $500), i feel it's a good deal. Hopefully, will see you all in wvw soon.

It should be fine, and don't worry too much about the HDD RPM. A 5400 RPM 2.5" HDD (laptop drive) and a 7200 RPM 3.5" HDD (desktop drive) have roughly the same read times. So unless you're used to SSDs or 10,000 RPM 3.5" HDDs you won't notice. I would suggest getting a cooling mat with a nice big fan in it though, games tend to work the processor and video card, and laptops don't have the airflow (even with built in fans) that desktops do.

Khy0te: thanks for the info, that is good to know. i'll be pricing the cooling mat & laptop bag over the weekend. (now if only it supported 2 monitors.....)

Off the top of my head, from what I understand GW2 is mostly demanding on the CPU, and not so much the video card. So while your HD access speed is always important, I think your biggest issue here will be your CPU speeds. I can also tell you that there is almost no way that HD is a SSD (based on the price, size and assumed age of the system). RAM is fine, bluray doesn't matter for GW2 purposes. If you're just looking for something that can run the game, I am confident it will run it, but only 'fine'. As previously stated, you won't be running the the game on High settings for sure, forget about Max settings. So, is it worth 500 bucks? Probably. Is it going to run GW2? Yes. Might you be better off upgrading your current system? Perhaps, depending upon what you have. Post your current system specs, and we can make some better suggestions and compare your options.

Ralcore: current system AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dual core 440 2.30ghz 4gb ram geforce 430 graphics card this system is more than 4 years old, and maxed at 4mb ram, it is a good system, but unfortunatly for mmo gaming, it has reached the end of it's potential. My next move would be to build a new system from the ground up, and considering the price i was given for the laptop, decided to jump on the offer. after installing gw2 on the laptop for a test, and loading into lion's arch, i was convinced that if nothing else, my overall gaming speed would improve - but i hope to have more time to hop to areas next week.

The laptop is better, you can always do more by "geek-building" a computer (buy parts and assemble). Why is the old machine maxed out at 4 GB of RAM? Is it the motherboard or that it's running a 32-bit OS? 64-bit OS's can go up to "{explicative deleted}-ton"™ of RAM; 32-bit OS's are limited to 3.79 GB of RAM (or close to that) due to the maximum number of memory addresses you can have using 32 bits per address. So, if you are using a 32-bit OS on the old system it really wasn't even using the full 4 GB of RAM that were installed even though the motherboard could detect all of it.

» Edited (for grammar) on: 2013-04-07 00:36:00 It should be able to do dual monitors, most laptops have an HDMI and/or a VGA port on the side that you could attach a second monitor to.

» Edited on: 2013-04-07 00:37:47

it was a motherboard limitation - current system is a 2.30 ghz amd athlon 64 x2 dual core, running an and acer em61sm/em61pm board. max mem for the motherboard is 4gb. i'm running win 7 32-but (don't have a lot of faith in 64 bit windows yet). i figure since i can but the laptop for $400, and given it's specs, i should have faster loading times and less culling in pve than i do now, and if i can also jump into wvw, that would just be icing on the cake.... I still want to build a gaming desktop, but this is an affordable in-between system until i can save the 1k needed for my next system. bad part is i lost my job this week, so i'm kinda glad i went for sooner rather than later. =) see you in game, G.