Guild Wars 2

Good evening,

Getting a laptop (already have a desktop) so I can play with my spouse. Knowing nothing about laptops I did some research, but help is always appreciated. The two I am looking at are:

MSI GE72 Apache Pro Gaming Laptop

Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-6700HQ Mobile Processor
Memory: 8GB [8GB x 1] 2133MHz DDR4 SO-DIMM Laptop Memory
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M 3GB GDDR5
Solid State Drive: 120GB Intel 535 Series M.2 SSD
Primary Hard Drive: 500 GB 7200rpm Super Slim Laptop Hard Drive

ASUS ROG G752VT-RH71

Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-6700HQ Mobile Processor
Memory: 16GB [8GB x 2] 2133MHz DDR4 SO-DIMM
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M 3GB GDDR5 [G752]
Solid State Drive: 120 GB Intel 540s Series SSD
Primary Hard Drive: 120GB Intel 535 Series SSD*

I’ve been playing on an old Sony Vaio which is heating up a bit too much and honestly old. I am leaning towards the ASUS as I heard it has better cooling. Budget wise I want to keep it around 1500, but under 2K.

What are your thoughts on these two, or if these are awful what would you suggest?

Thank you!

Depends on what the price jump up to one equipped with 980M is (that is about 30% faster).

For GW2, those are more than enough.

You sure the ROG comes with two 128GB SSDs instead of one laptop HD and one SSD? If this is correct, and prices are equal, i’d lean to the ROG as the it has 8GB extra RAM and double SSD. The smaller capacity doesnt matter as you can always use a 1TB external USB3 HDD for big files anyway.

I think those are overkill, a $600 laptop will work fine. I just got an Acer Aspire laptop for $529 and it plays fine.

I think you should focus on what keyboard layout suits you. My Acer has a terrible keyboard layout but I knew that going in, most of the time I have an external keyboard and mose on it anyway.

Cakemeister.5792:

I think those are overkill, a $600 laptop will work fine. I just got an Acer Aspire laptop for $529 and it plays fine.

Not if you want to play with decent settings/framerates…

Dawdler.8521:

Depends on what the price jump up to one equipped with 980M is (that is about 30% faster).

The 980 busts my budget, so I’m sticking with the 970. Wish I could get the 980.

zakuruchi.4086:

For GW2, those are more than enough.

You sure the ROG comes with two 128GB SSDs instead of one laptop HD and one SSD? If this is correct, and prices are equal, i’d lean to the ROG as the it has 8GB extra RAM and double SSD. The smaller capacity doesnt matter as you can always use a 1TB external USB3 HDD for big files anyway.

I’ll double check and update this post, I may have mis copied the specs from what I modeled on ibuypower.com

This may or may not apply to you, but figured I’d just advise incase. I bought a pretty beast gaming laptop around 2 years ago for an ex of mine to play Guild Wars 2. Was an i7 with a GTX 960 4gb. I found gw2 is pretty kitten CPU heavy, and the game ran beautifully, but the laptop switched off often while playing. I later found out that it was actually only Guild Wars 2 pushing to 90-100fps which was pushing the CPU temp up to like 99’c, and with laptops not having the best cooling fans, this didn’t work out. A frame limiter to 60fps fixed the issue, and dropped the temp down to stable.

Hope it works out, and your spouse doesn’t make you do all their jumping puzzles for them like mine did! -_-

Buy a mini-desktop and stream the game to a cheaper laptop – I have two gaming cubes and can stream games to any laptop, I use AMDs technology to do this but I am sure there are plenty of alternatives, frankly there is no substitute for a 24" monitor with GW2 but there are some games where this doesn’t matter.

As regards the specs of the laptops mentioned, 120GB of SDD is small for the price you’re playing. I also think Seagate is producing hybrids with 32GB SS(cache) + 1 or 2 TB HDD – these are far better value for your money relative to the overall cost of the laptop.

Also if you’re gaming with a laptop you’re well advised to invest in a secondary monitor.

I would also predict that over the next year or two new desktops are going to shrink to a quarter of there current size. I can already do this with current technology, unfortunately the size (or length) of high level graphics cards holds this back from going all the way. That problem is going away very soon …

Overall I would say laptops – for the same $ – are half as powerful as a desktop and have half the lifecycle of a desktop.

lilypop.7819:

I would also predict that over the next year or two new desktops are going to shrink to a quarter of there current size. I can already do this with current technology, unfortunately the size (or length) of high level graphics cards holds this back from going all the way. That problem is going away very soon …

Yeah, you can get an ITX computer but the average desktop isn’t going to shrink to a quarter of its current size in the next year or two lmao. There’s absolutely no reason for them to and no trend that would even come close to indicating that that would happen.

zakuruchi.4086:

For GW2, those are more than enough.

You sure the ROG comes with two 128GB SSDs instead of one laptop HD and one SSD? If this is correct, and prices are equal, i’d lean to the ROG as the it has 8GB extra RAM and double SSD. The smaller capacity doesnt matter as you can always use a 1TB external USB3 HDD for big files anyway.

You are correct its a Primary Drive which is the Intel and the Optical Drive, you can have kitten Vs. the Laptop and I was misreading the specs.

Galbedir.9178:

This may or may not apply to you, but figured I’d just advise incase. I bought a pretty beast gaming laptop around 2 years ago for an ex of mine to play Guild Wars 2. Was an i7 with a GTX 960 4gb. I found gw2 is pretty kitten CPU heavy, and the game ran beautifully, but the laptop switched off often while playing. I later found out that it was actually only Guild Wars 2 pushing to 90-100fps which was pushing the CPU temp up to like 99’c, and with laptops not having the best cooling fans, this didn’t work out. A frame limiter to 60fps fixed the issue, and dropped the temp down to stable.

Hope it works out, and your spouse doesn’t make you do all their jumping puzzles for them like mine did! -_-

Thanks for the advice, I’m on my own for those jumping puzzles though!!

lilypop.7819:

Buy a mini-desktop and stream the game to a cheaper laptop – I have two gaming cubes and can stream games to any laptop, I use AMDs technology to do this but I am sure there are plenty of alternatives, frankly there is no substitute for a 24" monitor with GW2 but there are some games where this doesn’t matter.

As regards the specs of the laptops mentioned, 120GB of SDD is small for the price you’re playing. I also think Seagate is producing hybrids with 32GB SS(cache) + 1 or 2 TB HDD – these are far better value for your money relative to the overall cost of the laptop.

Also if you’re gaming with a laptop you’re well advised to invest in a secondary monitor.

I would also predict that over the next year or two new desktops are going to shrink to a quarter of there current size. I can already do this with current technology, unfortunately the size (or length) of high level graphics cards holds this back from going all the way. That problem is going away very soon …

Overall I would say laptops – for the same $ – are half as powerful as a desktop and have half the lifecycle of a desktop.

Thanks for the suggestion, this seems a bit advanced for what I am looking for budget and space wise. I appreciate the info though I was not aware this was an option.