Will this laptop run WoW?

[Richmond]

Hi,

I posted a few weeks ago about purchasing a new computer. After quite a bit of deliberation, i eventually decided on getting a laptop because our "Office" in the house is dark, dingy and a mile away from the front room where i GF watches tv... Anyway. I went with the XPS 17 from Dell as it fitted my needs and looked the part. The spec is as follows

Display : 17.3in HD+ WLED True-Life (1600x900) with 2.0 Mega Pixel Integrated Camera
Memory : 4096MB (2x2048) 1333MHz DDR3 Dual Channel
Hard Drive : 320GB Serial ATA (7200RPM)
Optical Drive : 8x DVD+/-RW Optical Drive
Graphics : 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 435M
Processor: Intel i5-480M(2.66GHz) Mobile CPU

Now i realise that laptops are never going to get the most out of a game, even WoW. But it was the better of two evils.

So with the exception of shadows, which i know is very demanding graphics wise, what would be the max settings i could hope to achieve with this set up. Its fairly budget but i was hoping for at least Mid to high?

And one final note, where should i be looking for a reasonably priced 4gb of DDR3 Ram, Dell wanted to charge me an additional £120.00 for it. I could've sworn i'd seen it for much cheaper to buy it separately, i plan on upgrading almost straight away when i get it delivered, is it worth it? Will it even make a difference?

[HopOnPop]

Dude I run WoW on a 5 year old, 15" HP Pavillion with a Geforce 7400. That computer will run the game.

[vesseblah]

Anyway. I went with the XPS 17 from Dell as it fitted my needs and looked the part.

Easiest way to find out how fast it is is installing WoW and playing it since you already bought it. Should work totally fine with over 40fps with shadows/multisampling set to halfway down and rest on high. Maybe even some settings on ultra.

And one final note, where should i be looking for a reasonably priced 4gb of DDR3 Ram, Dell wanted to charge me an additional £120.00 for it. I could've sworn i'd seen it for much cheaper to buy it separately, i plan on upgrading almost straight away when i get it delivered, is it worth it? Will it even make a difference?

For WoW additional RAM will not make any difference. And yes, Dell and most OEMs make their profits with options like extra RAM. You need to open the laptop's memory hatch and see what kind of RAM chips are there already. If there's 2 chips they're 2GB each and you need to replace both to add more RAM and need to buy 2x4GB, but if there's just one it's 4GB and you can buy another 4GB to go with it. The RAM is probably SO-DIMM DDR3 1333MHz type, but if you're unsure, just take one RAM stick with you to the computer store and ask the salesperson to give same type. Manual that comes with the laptop probably has the RAM specs listed somewhere.

[Uvania]

Dell is bad

http://www.amazon.com/G73JW-A1-Repub...1163615&sr=8-4

this computer is what you should have bought :P

http://www.amazon.com/G53JW-A1-Repub...ref=pd_cp_pc_3

or that one depends on budget but lower then a gtx 460 is not suitable for maxed graphics

i have the 15,6 version and im running wow on maxed out settings with dx11 enabled in config and i never drop under 30 fps

[Richmond]

Well i have bought it, its just not being delivered till mid April. So i can't install WoW yet...

The ram (as i detailed) is 2 x 2gb of DDR3 ram, so i'll shop around and find a few sticks. It can take a max of 16gb

Plus i went with Dell because they offer flexible finance packages!

[malkara]

Yes, it will run wow fine.

you don't need more than 4 gigs for wow really.

Just run it on medium, is all you need.

EDIT: on the dell is bad comment. I disagree, got myself an i7 with a gt435M for 800 euro's 4 gigs of ram too. That's not a bad deal imho. Then again, I don't see the point of spending enough to run a game on max on a laptop.

[OmnitronDefenseSystem]

It will run wow fine. I ran wow on a Toshiba Satellite with 2gb of ram and onboard graphics, and didn't lag too badly, only in raids.

[nwo]

It will run wow fine. I ran wow on a Toshiba Satellite with 2gb of ram and onboard graphics, and didn't lag too badly, only in raids.

I used to run WoW on a 1.6GHz Centrino laptop with 1GB of RAM and oboard graphics, but that was just for AFKing BGs on alts during BC.