Laptop Virgin needs buying advice

[tsgray70]

Hi all

I am about to buy my first laptop and I am man enough to admit i know nothing about them. My max budget is £400 and apart from the usual I really want it to play World of Warcraft at a decent speed.

I have been looking at the Asus X59GL-AP007C which is just in budget. My main question is regarding the whole shared graphics idea. Is it a big deal?

All advice gratefully received.

 

[sja360]

it has the Nvidia 8200 integrated graphics yea? i'm tempted to say yes it would run, but as for how well... hmmm i dunno, it would run better than an intel integrated X3100/X4500 graphics chipset.

 

[Moeks]

To run WoW at a decent speed with decent settings in Northrend you are going to need something with at least an 8600GT using DDR2 or an ATI 2600/3650 really, which you aren't going to get new for £400. The new content and graphics engine improvements have made the game a lot more demanding than it used to be.

You might be able to extract something acceptable out of a Geforce 9300 if you are just milling about and doing the odd quest, gathering resources etc. I don't think it would like 25 man raiding very much though, it might be ok on 10 man. I managed to get 'reasonble' performance out of a Macbook using a 9400 which is supposed to be very similar to the 9300 in performance, but that was supported by a Penryn 2.4ghz and 2Gb of DDR3 memory, which you also won't get for £400.