Thinking about a laptop

[Sarota]

Hi,

I'm thinking about getting a new laptop for school, and so my wife and I can play WOW together. I'm only wanting to spend around 1200-1500 on one. Will a notebook with the follwing specs be okay?

Intel Core Duo 2 processor 1.66GHz
2GB Ram
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator with up to 128 mb shared

The video ram is what I'm worried about, but I'm not sure if the Duo core will compensate for the lower video ram. Any suggestions would be great.

[Beruen]

That would be my big concern as well. I've heard nothing but bad about playing WoW on machines with integrated graphics on desktops, and if the video of the laptop has "shared" memory, I'm sure that puts it in that category.

Sadly, I was looking at laptops recently, and didn't see an inexpensive one that had a decent graphics adapter.

[eggo]

I looked to invest in a Acer Travelmate, which I have..work well and it's not as up to date as Core Duo 2, it's still run on AMD and has a ATI Radeon Xpress 700. This laptop is a little over a year old and still run WoW fine with 1.5gb of ram. If you are looking for a laptop, use newegg or amazon and look for acers, they're good even if their name isn't as big as Dell or Intel or whatever.

[Kalos]

Intel Graphics is the bottom of the barrel. The best intergrated manufacturer is ATI, try and get an Radeon Xpress if you can, far superior shader functionality, and higher up on benchmarks typically. The cheapest dedicated is something like a 7400 Geforce Go, but they're always coupled with pretty pricy laptops.

[ZVi]

dont go intel integrated

unless ofc you want consistent 12fps on AV

[jrichard]

I bought an ASUS G1 recently. It a little more than you've listed for your price range, 1700-1800 dollars depending on where you get it, but very nice.

2.0Ghz core 2 duo
2Gb ram
160Gb hard drive
nvidia GeForce Go 7700 512mb

In looking around before i bought it, i'd say it's not gonna be easy to find a laptop in your price range that doesn't use shared memory for video.

jrichard

[Sarota]

Thanks for the quick responses. I'm going out hunting around best buy today see what I can dig up. So basically if I have to go integrated look for ATI then. Thanks again.

[Sarota]

Well I ended up getting an HP special edition laptop. I think it's pretty nice

AMD 64 x2 duel core
128 mb GeForce 6150 ( i think that's right)
1gb ram
120 gb hard drive

Since the video is a dedicated card, can I upgrade that in the future if I want? I've never really been sure about upgrading laptops.Thanks

[Kalos]

Well I ended up getting an HP special edition laptop. I think it's pretty nice

AMD 64 x2 duel core
128 mb GeForce 6150 ( i think that's right)
1gb ram
120 gb hard drive

Since the video is a dedicated card, can I upgrade that in the future if I want? I've never really been sure about upgrading laptops.Thanks
It really depends on how HP interfaced the card with the rest of the motherboard. There are multiple ways they could have rigged it up, I couldn't say without taking it apart myself.