Need help with buying an affordable WoW laptop

[Vash The Stampede]

That's basically correct, but I think you meant "throw in an Nvidia or AMD GPU", not Intel. :P But yes. Dedicated GPU = Intel wins. Integrated graphics/APU = AMD wins.

Yea sorry, meant to say Nvidia. Brain farted that.

While Intel is king in WoW, I haven't seen Intel do well in WoW with Intel HD graphics, even in older MoP benchmarks. I really wished Intel offered Iris Pro graphics as an option but that's limited to Apple 15" Macbook Pro's. Interestingly, they even come with quad cores. But that falls well beyond bobokiller's price range. Also find it odd that the first reaction to someone with a limited budget is to try to convince them to increase that budget. People here need to learn to respect that others don't have money to throw around, or maybe don't want to.

Bobokiller, the laptop you found is fine but also consider my suggestion. Remember that most modern laptops solder their CPUs to the motherboard, so it's no longer upgradable. At least I don't believe it is on these. While the ram and hard drive in mine are lower, the CPU is greater. You can always upgrade the ram and drive if needed in the future. As for how it'll play WoW, it'll do fine at lower graphic settings. Everyone here forgets that games don't always need to run at max settings.

[PetersenIV]

You are the one asking for advice here, not me. I could post tons of links to show the exact opposite of what your opinion is. WoW is a CPU intensive game and AMD under performs when compared to Intel at all price points. As I said for $400 you won't find anything unless it is a refurbished one.

Please do; I'm trying to convince my brother that he really wants an intel CPU for his new gaming PC, but he's dead set on AMD for reasons beyond my ken.

[Vash The Stampede]

Please do; I'm trying to convince my brother that he really wants an intel CPU for his new gaming PC, but he's dead set on AMD for reasons beyond my ken.

Maybe he's not brand loyal? I would argue that AMD APU's kinda sit in a bad place. On one hand their cheap alternatives to buying a CPU+GPU, but in a desktop computer there's no reason cause when you factor the cost of the higher priced ram you're not saving yourself anything. On the other hand even though Intel's HD 4600 isn't as good, it really doesn't matter cause you'll throw in a discrete card from Nvidia or AMD anyway. Any $50 GPU would be faster.

On top of that AMD demands a high price for these chips. Their A10 7850K is $160, which is just shy $20 of buying an Intel i5. But laptops are a different situation all together. There's no upgrading the graphics, so you're married to whatever comes with it. So even though AMD's CPU performance is lacking, they make up for it on the GPU side. As these benchmarks show there's no reason not to go AMD for a laptop. What good is CPU performance when overall performance is what matters to games?

Also, I never heard of a FX-7500 CPU. Sure seems to be a lot faster then the A10's.

[Arbiter]

Oh my god Duke please don't use the U series CPUs for comparison. That's just not fair. A plain dick move on whoever used those to try and compare performance to be honest because they aren't even meant to be performance chips. That's definitely one way to manipulate results. (4710MQ is literally about double the performance of the 4500U)

But I do agree, in terms of laptops up until you start getting into dedicated GPUs, AMD APU chips are probably the better option.

[Vash The Stampede]

Oh my god Duke please don't use the U series CPUs for comparison. That's just not fair. A plain dick move on whoever used those to try and compare performance to be honest because they aren't even meant to be performance chips. That's definitely one way to manipulate results. (4710MQ is literally about double the performance of the 4500U)

But I do agree, in terms of laptops up until you start getting into dedicated GPUs, AMD APU chips are probably the better option.

Fair enough, but the cheapest 4710MQ I can find is this Lenovo. Pretty beastly but then again it does have an Nvdia chip as a GPU. Though I noticed there was a lot of refurbished HP's with older i7's in them. Remember what I said about their cheap solder? There's a number of Dell's too. Guess which two companies to stay away from?

[Arbiter]

Fair enough, but the cheapest 4710MQ I can find is this Lenovo. Pretty beastly but then again it does have an Nvdia chip as a GPU. Though I noticed there was a lot of refurbished HP's with older i7's in them. Remember what I said about their cheap solder? There's a number of Dell's too. Guess which two companies to stay away from?

I was just using the 4710MQ as a comparison to a similar i7, which both are found in similarly prices laptops. I'm sure there are equivalents for the i5 and i3 ...just not going to be bothered to find them all to make a note of something. My comment wasn't intending on recommending the i7 to the OP, it was simply to point out that the chart was a bad comparison.