Buying a Laptop, gaming.. What do i do?

[sarym13]

Okay so I am starting to travel a lot, school, family, and personal trips. Mainly using my phone but I am wanting to get a laptop so I can start playing my PC games like WoW and any current titles without lagging on Med-High graphic settings

Thing is. I got no clue in how purchasing a Laptop works. Not even sure if you can upgrade the processor / GPU like how you can with a Desktop.

So I need to know, how am I to know what laptop is good / where to buy it?

In terms of price I am looking to spend 1k USD$. And am from the States.

Any tips, recommendation / info I could use is highly appreciated. It's probably gonna be a month before I am purchasing it. So if there is anything new (like the new AMD GPU's coming out soon) that will be coming to a laptop in a month or few Ill more than likely wait till then

[tielknight]

If your are going to be playing WoW, your looking at a Intel-based laptop to get the best performance. Generally you cannot swap out parts like the CPU/GPU as they are usually hard-wired into the motherboard(not 100% on this, haven't dug into laptops in a while).

You can generally find a decent laptop on Newegg or a similar site. After a quick glance through Newegg, the best one I can find seems to be the Acer Aspire with the i7-4702MQ and the GTX 760M for $799.

You can use the extra money to get a SSD for it and move windows onto that and use the 5400rpm drive for storage. Most of the reviews are good and some are not(not counting the guy that had it set to use the integrated graphics instead of the Nvidia graphics), but it seems to be a decent machine.

[naadra]

In regards to upgrading just like a pc for the future, there are some companies laptops that are upgradeable at a later date. Most of them are boutique companies though so you will end up spending more. Most of them though for future upgrades, they will only charge you for the parts and thats it, no labor etc. I dont know all the companies off the top of my head but a few are- Alienware, Mythlogic, Origin, and most boutique dealers. My personal opinion I think it is better long term wise to buy one that you can upgrade instead of one you have to chuck after so many years. I believe it will save you money in the long run. You can replace everything in some of them, motherboard, cpu, gpus, drives, even upgrade the screen, audio and keyboards as well. Most cases you can do all the upgrades yourself as well. I hope this bit of info may have helped in some way, good luck!! =)

[junky]

The Acer tielknight linked to is quite good for $800.

Anyway, you have to decide about screen size preference and define some games you want to play

[sarym13]

In terms of defining games I want to play, right now anyways its WoW, DayZ (Arma 2 Mod) Team Fortress 2. CS:GO, BF3. Right now those are just the games I frequent the most, would want to play those on at the very least medium settings

Will the laptop that Tie linked be good for that?

[tielknight]

In terms of defining games I want to play, right now anyways its WoW, DayZ (Arma 2 Mod) Team Fortress 2. CS:GO, BF3. Right now those are just the games I frequent the most, would want to play those on at the very least medium settings

Will the laptop that Tie linked be good for that?

The Acer is the best deal you are going to get unless you do alot of hunting and hope to find a better one. It's currently $400 off it's normal price, which is a bit crazy but good news for you if you can snag it before it run out of stock or the price jumps back up. The 760M is about equal to the GTX 660(with some lower clock speeds) and the 660 is more than enough to handle (most) games at medium-high settings at 1080p and you can always use the Turbo-Boost option on the CPU to bump it up to 3ghz or such.

[glo]

The Acer is the best deal you are going to get unless you do alot of hunting and hope to find a better one. It's currently $400 off it's normal price, which is a bit crazy but good news for you if you can snag it before it run out of stock or the price jumps back up. The 760M is about equal to the GTX 660(with some lower clock speeds) and the 660 is more than enough to handle (most) games at medium-high settings at 1080p and you can always use the Turbo-Boost option on the CPU to bump it up to 3ghz or such.

The 760m is 2x to 3x slower than a 660 depending on the game. Notebook GPUs are insanely far behind compared to desktop parts. The only current mobile chip that does well is the 780m which inches past the desktop 660. The 760m is more along the lines of a 7750.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7287/a...s-vs-laptops/3

[MrPaladinGuy]

Look for the best performing CPU + GPU, ignore the cores, what matters is the performance which is based on IPC/architecture. This is why you check benchmarks (something having 8 cores doesn't make it awesome).

Ignore something boasting about having a stupid large amount of Vram, 1GB is fine, what matters most are the actual specs of the GPU (not just the chipset), research it.

Make sure you have enough system memory too, an absolute minimum of 4GB for Windows 7/8 64bit, 8GB is recommended.

You should aim for the best cost-to-performance ratio Sandy Bridge CPU you're willing to pay for, as WoW is extremely CPU dependent with more people around you, this is also assuming you're not GPU bottlenecked.

[ProfessorTjc]

If you're looking to spend about $1k then I would go with http://www.ibuypower.com/. They can build a really nice laptop and they have really good customer service and warranties.

[tielknight]

If you're looking to spend about $1k then I would go with http://www.ibuypower.com/. They can build a really nice laptop and they have really good customer service and warranties.

Personally I would go with a Sager from XoticPC over Ibuypower/Cyberpower. Looks to be a bit cheaper than the cyber/ibuy configs and starts out with a GTX 765M instead of the GT 740/750M for similar(bit over $1k) priced laptops.