Guild Wars 2

I’m currently looking into new laptops and I want to make sure that the laptop I get can run Guild Wars 2 with as little lag as possible. I’d prefer zero lag but I’d rather get a laptop that is closer to the $300 mark ($500 being the max I’m willing to spend).

I’m thinking about one of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834318544

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834318541

But I’m not sure if either are a good choice or not. I mainly play PvE and only ever do WvWvW when doing a daily.

For what it’s worth…

With MMOs (such as GW2) you’ll want to focus on 2 things, processor speed and GFX card. The refurbed (yes, I made that up) i5 costs more. But, with the boost in speed, you’ll get more performance.

The real unknown factor is the on-board Intel video card. I don’t know how well it will run GW2. If you want to play mainstream video games, I recommend PCs with dedicated graphics cards. That said, if they’re out of your price point; you just have to work with what you’ve got.

Here are the min specs from the GW2 website.
Windows® XP Service Pack 2 or better
Intel® Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, Core i3 OR AMD Athlon 64 X2, or better
2 GB RAM
NVIDIA® GeForce® 7800, ATI X1800, Intel HD 3000, or better (256 MB of video RAM and shader model 3.0 or better)
25 GB available HDD space
Broadband Internet connection
Keyboard and mouse

Looking at these specs, it seems that the i5 laptop will run GW2. However, you’ll probably be running the game at low to med settings. (medium might be a stretch; but, it’s possible)

If your heart is not set on a laptop, I would recommend a desktop. From my experience and research; you might be able to get 2x the performance for the amount of money you’ll spend.

As for the lag expectations, you’ll need to buy a much much nicer computer to come close to a zero lag experience.

Thoughts about Processor Cores:

I’d never recommend anything today with less than 2 cores.
Theoretically, if you had to choose between an 8 core 1.7 GHz processor vs 4 core 3 GHz, I’d recommend the 4 core.

The reason being, MMOs today (in general) still do not fully take advantage of multi-core PCs. You can expect most MMOs to use 1 maybe 2 cores at most. So, until this situation changes, you’ll normally get better performance from higher processor speed than a higher core count.

I apologize if this is too much info =P

This game is my guilty pleasure and when I go to visit relative for a week or so, I usually like to play this after dinner. That means I need a laptop.

The last laptop that I had that was able to run GW 2 (with minimal if any lag) was a lenovo ThinkPad W500. and the closes I can seem to find in terms of specs are these two:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834319464R
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834319701

Then again getting one of them might produce the same results as my current one.

First things first, I don’t want to be a jerk but its always good to politely fix things before its too late.

Lag is caused by your internet connection and has absolutely nothing to do with your gaming spec. What you describe as “lag” is the frame rates per second (FPS). Higher frame rate gives you smoother gameplay feel and lower…. well we all know how that feels -.-’’

Second, both of those laptops are extremely bad for gaming. I’m sorry if you’re on a low budget, but if you want to game on a laptop, you gotta have a deep pocket — a full one, at that.

Like another user suggested above, there are 3 VERY important things to consider when you expect gaming on a laptop and if you fall short on any of these 3, your gaming experience will become a nightmare.

1) Most important out of 3 — Cooling.

If you’re gaming on a laptop, you want to have a GAMING laptop, which is designed in a way to have larger casing for air ventilation and a lot of isolation to keep the hardwares intact for long years. That being said, not even gaming laptops come close to the cooling efficiency of a Desktop computer simply because you are limited to the confined space of a “portable PC”.

2) CPU (processor)

The times are changing my friend… Back then we used to go ham on the graphics card to have the best performance in MMOs but lately, what defines the perfect MMO experience is the quality of your CPU. You can’t be cheap on processor. You need at least i5 to have decent performance. i7 is great for multitasking if you’re into doing a lot of background tasks along with your gaming (such as browsers, playing music etc…)

3) GPU (graphics card)

Yup, since we’re playing vast combination of animated pixels, we are required to have a great graphics card to run things smooth. Your two options are AMD and nVidia. Both are fine, AMD is like the cheaper version with “less” game support, whereas for elitists, nVidia is the best graphics card out there with much better game optimization. I don’t want to get into debates on this one as I think its all personal preference.
————————
Now once you get these parts handled, optional but recommended components are:

-8 GB RAM
-SSD to install the OS and games in + any HDD of your choice
-Laptop cooling pad (a good aluminium one — like Thermaltake)

These are all I could think of. To be frankly, I didn’t even know a ThinkPad W500 could run GW2… I’m lost for words… Depending on what your idea of “playable” is I suppose it will work. However, for having a healthy gaming experience you want no less than 30 FPS. This is important for both enjoying the game and keeping your eyes healthy.

I would recommend checking articles like: http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/the-best-budget-gaming-laptop-so-far/ or https://laptopninja.io/finding-the-best-gaming-laptops-under-500-dollars/ to find at least workable gaming laptops. You do NOT want to play games on an integrated graphics i3/i5 4 gb ram machine…

Sorry to be harsh and straight forward, I just want to save you a couple of hundred bucks. You can buy much better desktops for around the same price you pay for a very very bad laptop (for gaming).

Good luck o/

Bliss is absolutely right on all points. Except maybe laptop cooling pad. Ive never needed or used one. I just want to add that I have played GW2 on a lot of computers of varying quality. The component i recommend you focus on is the CPU. GW2 is very CPU heavy. Even on low graphics, Ive had terrible framerates when i had a great graphic card but a mediocre CPU.
When i played with the opposite situation, Great CPU/integrated graphics card, it was a much better experience. I could have medium quality and still have decent framerates in zerg situations.

Skye.2038:

Bliss is absolutely right on all points. Except maybe laptop cooling pad. Ive never needed or used one. I just want to add that I have played GW2 on a lot of computers of varying quality. The component i recommend you focus on is the CPU. GW2 is very CPU heavy. Even on low graphics, Ive had terrible framerates when i had a great graphic card but a mediocre CPU.
When i played with the opposite situation, Great CPU/integrated graphics card, it was a much better experience. I could have medium quality and still have decent framerates in zerg situations.

Thanks I’ve been gaming on laptops since forever… needless to say its been a love/hate relationship. Mostly love when you buy a fresh one and it goes smooth for the first few years and you get to enjoy things like LAN parties with friends and take your gaming anywhere… But there’s always double sides to a coin

For the cooling pad, I have to say if you haven’t tried one yet you definitely should! Good cooling pads reduce heating in between 5-10 degrees Celsius. It really depends on the quality of the pad, the ventilation holes of your laptop. Some laptops have bad “architecture”, ventilation UNDER the laptop instead of back side, and without a cooling pad or structure to elevate the laptop, believe me, it falls short on cooling. Hence getting a pad solves a lot of the problem + cool it additionally.

Here are some examples:

http://heavy.com/tech/2015/03/best-laptop-cooling-pad-cooler-fan-accessories/

I actually found out recently that my current laptop falls drastically short of fulfilling the minimum requirements regarding the graphics card. Didn’t realize this since it was a hand-me-down and newer than my previous laptop.

As for Internet connection I know that it’s not a problem due to doing a speed test a month back after fixing my Internet router and keeping my laptop hooked via Ethernet.

Lag is dew to your internet connection. Fps drops, now that can look like lag, but is very different. A good system will fix that. But the laptops you’ve show will probably handle the game on low at best. To play the game on high settings and to minimize the change of stutter, for example, my PC coat me close to £600. And I’ve not had fps stutter at all. My old rig, yeah, big Tim in WvW and world boss fights. But lag. Nope. Not really noticed it in GW2. GW1 you would notice it. But that was 10 years ago, when the internet was still finding its feet speed and reliability wise.