Advice on new laptop

[Dakotarick]

I bought the 9750 and so far have been thrilled with it. Before I wrote the check, I built notebooks at some of the other manufacturers sites using as close to the same components as I could. There was not much price difference and if I remember correctly the Alienware was about 300$ less expensive than the Dell XPS.

I would do some shopping yourself and make up your own mind about what you are paying for. A guy I work with said the same thing but after seeing mine he ordered his last week LOL.

[Cruor]

Originally Posted by Pontofelle

yes that is alot of nerds.
but if thats what ya want, Id go for it. I got a refirb'd one from Alienware thru ebay. Its basically half price. Its awesome running Wow full tilt and still getting 60fps. Also Alienware(Tech service) is awesome. I was missing a driver. They had me fixed in 5 mins.

would you advise considering buying one from ebay, =/ ???? i think it's a bit risky do you not think?

[dyson]

Originally Posted by Gritz

If you have 3k to drop, the high rez 17" MBP is really, really nice. Load up Windows in Bootcamp for non-WoW gaming.

I'm on the latest 15" MacbookPro (2.4 core 2 duo, 256mb geforce 8600m gt) and it's "OK" but I wouldn't necessarily "recommend" it as a pure WOW laptop. Apple is known for nice laptops but not high performing graphics.

I play on it for about 4-5 hours at a time. The graphics card and CPU is similar to the 17", only the LCD is smaller and I find that still within a minute the CPU gets hot and the fan starts pumping out the heat. I doubt the 17" would be any different. I also maxed out the RAM to 4gig.

I have a reasonable mix of high and low end features turned on/off in WoW setup so that I can see what is coming but most terrain details should not hog the CPU. I also had started in full screen mode but started to realize that running in a window is a lot more conveneit to tab out to the browser for looking up quests.

With that said, MacOS is very stable compared to my past windows laptops and it's a lot more fun to use for non-WOW. And although it gets hot, I've never ever had WOW crash on me in Mac.

I also played previously on a MacBook core 2 duo setup and it was pretty much the same but I definitely couldn't turn on any nice graphics features. I had to go plain vanilla or the fps was noticeably slow. A friend of mine is using that model MacBook as a new Wow user and thinks it's OK. I suppose it would be if you haven't gotten used to anything better.

So if you were going Mac, I would recommend MacBookPro, but if Mac vs PC doesn't bother you, I think there are better performing laptops out there for WoW in all likelihood.

[Pontofelle]

Originally Posted by Cruor

would you advise considering buying one from ebay, =/ ???? i think it's a bit risky do you not think?

I bought mine thru alienware so there is no risk really. It came with a 90 day warrenty. Now if you buy it from Joe Schmo then yes its risky

on the alienware site there is a link to the ebay sales.
eBay Store - Alienware Corporation: