Guild Wars 2

I’m trying to find a gaming laptop for 3000 or under, but the options are overwhelming me, purchasing in January

I want something that can run this game in all its glory, and will not be obsolete in 2 years. If possible a back lighted keyboard, but no laser light show… Any ideas?

two high end desktops

I got the Origin Eon 17-2 and pimped it out for around 2800 and it is a beast. I can play GW2 on high settings (as well as Skyrim on Ultimate Settings with all of the highest def mods without a stutter)… take a look sounds like it might be a good fit for you

http://www.originpc.com/Laptops/Gaming/EON17-S/?TAB=FEATURES&ACTIVE=TRUE&SYSTEMID=3

With that budget, I’m assuming you want the best possible GPU, the GTX 680m. You have 4 options.

Alienware M17x R4 – most expensive option, comes with backitten keyboard, bordering on laser lightshow.

Clevo P170EM – reference for multiple boutique shop laptops like AVA Direct, Origin PC, Sager, etc. Some boutique shop offers backitten keyboards.

iBUYPOWER CZ-17 – cheaper option for the GTX 680m. A gaudy imitation of the already gaudy Alienware, with lights bleeding everywhere.

Updated MSI GT60 &GT70 – The GT60 is the cheapest option for the GTX 680m while the GT70 is comparable to the others. Backitten keys and not as gaudy as the CZ-17 or Alienware.

The MSI GT60 is below 2k while the others range from 2.3k to 2.8k depending on configuration, with Alienware the most expensive.

Buying a gaming laptop is usually a gross waste of money. If you want to spend $3k on a new outfit, great! Here’s what you do:

Buy yourself a beastly desktop setup. You can have a quality gaming rig that will rival the performance of any $3k gaming laptop for around $1,500. Or you can splurge and for around $2,500 you will have a desktop that screams well into the future.

I’m guessing you need a laptop for work/study or something. Use the remaining $500-1,500 to buy yourself a laptop well suited for your other needs (i.e. more portable, lighter, longer battery life).

Trust me when I say that gaming and laptop are two things that are at odds with each other. Think of it like stats in GW2. Sure you can build for power, vitality, toughness, condi damage, healing, and crit all at the same time. You’ll end up good at nothing in particular. Same thing applies in the real world with PC hardware. You can specialize and focus on core competency, or you can try to buy a jack of all trades and then realize that it isn’t particularly good at any of the things you wanted it for.

Heat is the biggest problem for performance rigs and the confined spaces of a laptop make it a necessity that their performance be neutered. Of course the manufacturers won’t let on about this – one reason being it is far more difficult for a person to build their own laptop than it is to build a desktop. As a result they make more money from selling you on the idea that gaming performance and mobility can achieve success together. This is a lie.

That doesn’t mean you won’t be able to play games on laptops. That doesn’t mean there isn’t great technology going into it. What it means is that a gaming laptop is like an F1 prius. Sure it’s possible, and lots of people may try to sell you on one, but conceptually they’ve just got it all wrong.

I don’t mean this as an insult to anyone who loves their Alienware or whatever else performance gaming laptop.

Also, the idea of mobile gaming itself is just a farce. None of those performance laptops will last much longer than an hour or two tops on battery. If you have to be tethered by an AC adapter then you might as well be on a desktop.

TLDR: Buy a desktop for gaming and a laptop for work/school. Don’t believe the hype that the two can be combined into one machine effectively. While you may be impressed with the performance, you will spend more than you need to and get less performance than you could gain from the advice I gave.

You can build a beastly desktop yourself for $1,500. But if you are dead-set on a laptop, the AlienwareM18X is the way to go. Here’s a link to your options http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-M18x-r2/pd.aspx

Yea, either 2 high end desktops for 1.5k each, or 1 high end desktop 1.5k-2k, then use the remaining monies on a laptop. I run gw2 on high with decent fps on my 1k laptop from 4 months ago. You can’t really buy a future proof gaming laptop so spending more than 2k on one is a huge waste

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4978457&CatId=4935

$2199 I got one buts its the gen before this— love it. This one has an ssd too.

Dont listen to all the guys talking about desktops. You want a laptop because you dont want a huge azz tower and want portability. Also I personally got tired of building and rebuilding. This will run whatever you what on high out the box and you can HDMI it to your TV in the living room if you want to play on the big screen.

Unless you need it to be portable… you’re wasting your money on buying a laptop.

The only advantage a ‘gaming’ laptop has is portability. Other then that, you’d want to spend the money building a beast PC rig. Which would probably set you back around $1.5k – $2k and is more future proof.

I can run GW2 on ultra high settings on my recently built PC rig and it cost me around $1.1k to build with plenty of headroom for overclocking (which makes it more future proof) do yourself a favour and listen to the sound advice given (unless you absolutely NEED portability – I would suggest going the PC route)

Some people dont like building rigs. He specifically asked for a laptop so stop trying to sell him on a tower lol.

Bro get the one I recommended you wont be disappointed at all especially if you need to use it for other stuff like school or work.

Its got a light up keyboard and a black rubber finish looks slick. Also has nice built in surround sound. I had a decent tower rig as well and sold it once I got this laptop because it gives pretty much (90% ) or the performance of the tower without the bulk and noise and restriction of sitting at home. I was playing GW2 in the airport when I went home in August lol. If you arent super OCD and just have to have ultra super top notch but want far better than average get the laptop man.

It doesnt really matter because tower or laptop both are gonna be obsolete in the same amount of time. If you’re like me and just hate building rigs or like I said want it for dual purpose like for school/work get the laptop.

sadly i dont think theres a gaming laptop in existence that wont be obsolete in 2 years . Even if you built one more powerful than the death star today down the road it would need an upgrade which is more expensive than it needs to be if not impossible when it comes to most laptops.

I bought an Alienware m17x with an I7-3610QM and a 7970m, installed two 240gig OCZ vertex IV SSDs in raid 0, upgraded to 32GB of ram and then added a 2TB HHD in the optical drive bay for just over 3k.

I do a lot of large file Photoshop work and I needed the extra RAM and fast SSDs on a mobile platform. As a side effect, it will tear through any video game out there on the highest settings (GW2 doesn’t even make it blink). If you drop the RAM upgrade that will save you a couple hundred bucks but I highly recommend the dual Vertex IVs in raid 0. The half second long Skyrim load screens and blistering fast windows/browser performance are worth the price. You might want the 680m (which is only a little better than the 7970m but twice the price). If you can swing it, 16GB of RAM is a noticeable improvement over 8GB when gaming too.

Right now is a great time to choose a gaming laptop. Mostly just because the 680m (a $522 upgrade) and 7970m (a $240) are as good as most desktop cards around $500 (or at least they were two months ago). Current desktop cards are only incremental improvements, but the current generation of laptop cards are massive improvements over their previous counterparts.

As many have indicated, you are far better off with a desktop and you will still have money left over to buy a laptop if you need a portable computer for work too.

Here are the facts:

A nine pound laptop is hardly portable.
One and a half hour battery life isn’t long enough.
Cramped keyboards are less ideal for gaming.
Trackpads suck. External mice means another thing to carry around with you.
A 7970m != 7970 by any stretch. It has roughly half the transistors, stream processors, and memory bandwidth.
Laptops are not very future proof. In a year your hardware will be outdated. In two it will be obsolete. With a desktop you can easily upgrade components over time and it will be much more future proof.

It’s your money – spend it how you like, but be informed before you make a decision.

You could also check out http://www.pro-star.com/ and http://www.factorgaming.com/ for some options, but I generally agree with others who have said that a desktop is generally the better way to go. Unless you really need the lower power consumption or the mobility, desktops are generally more powerful for less money than laptops, and they tend to be more stable and easier to upgrade, so they generally keep their value for longer.

First things first: if you want a gaming laptop, go for a high-end processor (not necessarily top-of-the-line, but you should get as close to that as your budget allows), and a top of the line graphics card. I believe your budget allows for a SLI or Crossfire setup. Don’t think twice, go for that when it comes to gaming laptops.

My personal reccomendation: Sager. The NP9370 is currently the top of the line, and it features a backitten keyboard. And yes, it will run GW2 on max settings at 60 fps (possibly more, if you don’t enable v-sync). Just remember what I said about always picking the top of the line graphics card setup for gaming laptops.

I currently have a NP7280 (Clevo x7200) which is now the ancestor to the NP9370. I’ve tried Alienware before (m17x – yes, the original one, NOT the M17x). Not bad, but I would say Sager offers a better price-performance ratio, not to mention it’s relatively easy to find spare parts and upgrades (and that includes graphics card upgrades – they’re non-proprietary, MXM-compliant) for Sager laptops. Sager also offers much better internal cooling, and it’s really easy to open a Sager for maintenance and cleanup, you just remove 1 panel and you have access to everything but the hard drives (unlike my m17x, in which you had to remove the graphics cards along with the heatsinks and the cooling fans for every cleanup, and the cards themselves caught dust due to the airflow and vent arrangement). Go for an official Sager reseller, as they offer better prices. I reccomend XoticPC, they offer excellent service.

Back to the laptop, the one I’ve got is more of a desktop replacement. It runs a desktop i7 960 (allows for the 990X) and a dual GTX 485m setup that gets me through basically every game I throw at it. I always use v-sync, so I don’t know how far it may go past 60 fps, but that’s the average I get on almost every game at max settings. On the most hardware-intensive games I’ve tried, I never get less than 30 fps – and the GTX 485m is what, like 2 years old already?

Since you’re buying a gaming laptop, do pick a Bigfoot Networks Killer network card. It DOES make a performance difference, I can tell you that (from personal experience: Killer = faster, Intel = better signal strength at long range).

Don’t expect to run this kind of computer on battery. It will last 1 hour or so on power saving mode. Even on high performance, the battery won’t provide enough juice for the computer to run as it would when it’s plugged in (with v-sync, I get 60 fps average on GW2 at max settings while plugged in, and it drops to 5-8 fps on battery).

One more thing that is irrelevant to me, but might be important to you, is the fact that this laptop is big. Quite big, and quite heavy as far as laptop standards go. You really can’t expect something different from a laptop of this type, not with the massive copper heatsinks and the 4 cooling fans you’ll find inside.

EDIT: Is something wrong with the forums? For some reason, the post clearly shows “backitten” instead of “backitten”. It shows the correct word on the edit menu, but the error remains on the original post.

EDIT: Just discovered the word L I T is being replaced for I T T E N. What’s this?

Charr Guardian.1497:

EDIT: Just discovered the word L I T is being replaced for I T T E N. What’s this?

It’s a side effect of having an extremely unintelligent word filter for all swear words and other "bad" phrases at the moderating team’s discretion. It likes to ignore the context of the letters and filter them even when they aren’t being used as a swear or vulgar word. In your case, since you didn’t mention the K, I am assuming you have a string or strings containing K, L, I, and T, which the filter is set to see as close enough to another word starting with C and just edit regardless of any letters around it or spaces in the middle.

For example, let me toss it inside a bunch of gibberish, and I’ll even add a space between:
dgsgsghkittendsdg

Flyfunner.2093:

two high end desktops

some of us don’t have the luxury of being at home, thanks for the useless standard desktop guy reply, you made it in earlier than expected, but we never doubted you’d arrive.

Still a waste of good money to buy a “gaming” laptop. They give overpriced a new meaning.

Same with alienware and all other brand gaming computers, you pay for the brand and not the parts. You can build the exact same one cheaper from scratch, 30-50% cheaper mostly.

My suggestion is, head over to the closest custom computer shop that builds PCs on demand, tell them what you want it to achieve and they will build it for you. A friend of mine got a monster tower PC built for 17000 SEK, thats roughly 2k euro, if he was going to buy something similar to that with a brand name it would cost 30k.

Brands = ripoff

Actually, I would say that it really is much better to just build a gaming desktop (and have a macbook for work and flexibility).

I just built one myself for ~ 800 € which should be able to comfortably play GW2 on high (if not max) settings – I can post my specs and experience with them later this week when I got it assembled and have GW2 transfered.

You’re not gonna carry a desktop tower from hotelroom to hotelroom. Even if gaming laptops are heavy, its still better than a tower+screen+keyboard+whatever. And NOT gaming is not really an option
I would personally not buy a gaming laptop, but would go for a high-end “regular” laptop. It will also run the game very decently. (even my 4 year old laptop runs GW2)

But anyway, to chip in. 7 friends (yes I counted) all have had Alienware laptops. Not a single one was pleased with it! every single one had multiple issues, returns and eventually refunds.

One unhappy customer, just bad luck, Two unhappy customers, who knows how they treat their laptop, but all 7?? Your mileage may vary o/c.

Phaethon.4986:

You’re not gonna carry a desktop tower from hotelroom to hotelroom. Even if gaming laptops are heavy, its still better than a tower+screen+keyboard+whatever. And NOT gaming is not really an option
I would personally not buy a gaming laptop, but would go for a high-end “regular” laptop. It will also run the game very decently. (even my 4 year old laptop runs GW2)

Ok, you might be right here – If I’m “on the road”, I just take a good book with me. Or play on my macbook, which still handles GW2 on an acceptable lvl…but I really mostly take a good book. Or five.

In that case, I suppose I’d also just go for a good regular laptop (or comparable macbook, if you have the money to spare – yes, I hate working on windows that much)

So many ppl ignore his comment about wanting a laptop. “9 pounds is hardly porable” Yeah right. Sure my Asus is bigger than the average laptop but it came with a backpack and I carry it around on my motorcycle all the time. 9 pounds is way lighter than some huge tower for a built rig with top of the line graphics card which are kitten near as big as a laptop just by themeselves, with a dozen fans, a 1000W PSU or watercooling the tower is gonna be a huge beast.

People are coming up with all kinds of funny reasons to detract you from buying a laptop here. You can get an external ketboard and mouse (I use a wifi keyboard and a razer naga both plugged into my laptop with USB) and I HDMI it to my tv in the living room when I’m at home and want to play on a big screen.

A regular highend laptop isnt gonna have a highend graphics card so you wont get the shinies. Thats the main reason to buy the gaming laptop. Like I said before a laptop will be obsolete at the same time a tower will so that argument isnt that relevant. By the time the GPU is outdated the motherboard and/or ram on a tower will be outdated as well so you will basically have to do almost a full rebuild anyway.

My current laptop has a GTX 660M, the newer version has a GTX670. I can currently run the game maxed out the only time I get hiccups is if theres a 50 ppl on the screen in WvWvW.

From what I read some of the new ultrabooks do have GTX600m GPUs and they are super thin, so that might be something to look into if you are worried about size.

If you specifically hate windows cant help you much there lol, but I wouldnt buy a Mac for gaming since they are overpriced for no reason, but you obviously have the cash so thats probably not a major factor.

As someone who can only game on a laptop (no home office to support a desktop), I’ve been using Clevo’s for 4 years now. They are generally less expensive than their name brand competitors. They are upgrade-able to an extent, so you can make them last over two years.

The current laptop I have is a 17" Clevo built by Mythlogic (nothing but good things to say about these guys, great customer service). After adding some bells and whistles, like a matte screen, it ended up being about $2500 in April 2011. Not done any upgrades since then and it rocks GW2 no issues.

buy the best gaming desktop and you will still have 1,500 dollars at hand.