Minimum specs to game

[druthu]

I did some browsing thru the forums, but i have a question.

I am a huge World of Warcraft (online) player. i like games like, Jedi Academy, Dawn of War, Unreal, battlefield, Dungeon Seige. things like that...


what would be the minimum specced laptop i could play it on. i guess where is the bottokm cars to get the job done and still enjoy gameplay.

what kind of video card would i need to play the game?

ram i would expect to start with 1 gig of ram.
i am not sure what processor i should be looking into, but i know the video card is where the game really starts and stops.

thanks,
D.

[freedon]

I can't say what is the minimum but I'll post my laptop specs as I also played WoW on it.

Pentium M 2.0Ghz
ait Radeon Mobile x600 (128MB)
1GB (512 x 2)
60GB 5,400rpm.

It was the fastest gaming machine from the DEll Latitude series.

Lately I haven't been able to play as well as I used to, with almost no jags. But I can still play with 1650x 1050 with almost max settings, though I haven't played in BG on it.

[kent1146]

To give you an idea, I use a Sony S360 laptop (see sig). It has a Pentium-M 1.7Ghz proc, an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 CPU, and 1 GB RAM. It is in no way a gaming powerhouse. I bought it because I travel a lot for work, and I wanted the smallest and lighest laptop that I could game on. I can run a lot of games very well, as long as I don't max out AA/AF and turn down world details.

To give you an idea, I run World of Warcraft on:
1280x800 24-bit color, 24-bit depth
0x AA / 8x AF. Level of Detail turned off.
Max draw distance, minimum environemtn detail, world detail, spell detail
Pixel shaders turned on, smooth shading, death effects etc turned off.
I Get 30-60fps

I can also run the SW:Empire at War demo just fine at native LCD res, details turned to medium. A setup like this will have no problem running older games like Jedi Academy, Unreal, Dungeon Siege, and newer games at medium or reduced detail levels.

There are some games that are extremely memory intensive, and would benefit from more than 1GB RAM. World of Warcraft and Battlefield 2 come to mind. I have a home PC that was upgraded from 1GB to 2GB RAM, and the games run much smoother. I can only imagine that upgrading my laptop from 1GB RAM to 1.5GB or 2GB RAM would have the same effect. I definitely recommend you get at least 1GB RAM. If you can afford it, I would recommend you get a 7200rpm hard drive, and then 1.5GB or 2GB RAM (in that order) for best overall laptop performance.

So, I would say start with at least on the level of a Radeon 9700. Once there, the choice of laptops really starts to show differences in GPU power vs size vs weight. Where you fall in that balance will depend on your personal tastes.

Like I said, the Sony S360 series maximizes the size and weight benefits of a small laptop, with GPU coming in 3rd. Sony just released the Sony SZ series to replace the S-series, which puts a Core Duo CPU and a Geforce 7400 Go GPU in the laptop. From everything I have heard about it, the 7400 roughly doubles the power of a Radeon 9700 (3DMark05 scores jump from ~1000 to ~2000).

[PCJ]

SZ series rocks. Finally fixed the problem of the later S series models (S4xx, S5xx). I already have a nice 12", but I'm still considering to sell my IBM and go all-Sony. Now if only they stopped loading all kinds of stupid **** onto their recovery CDs and actually offered drivers for costum installations of Windows. I had to recompile the binaries that were on the CD to get them to work on XP Pro ffs...

[kent1146]

SZ series rocks, and addresses the battery life drop when going from S3xx --> S4xx --> S5xx series. The Geforce 7400 Go is a nice addition too!

And yes, I agree, Sony does load a bunch of crap on the laptops. First thing I would do is to download the latest drivers from sony.com, put them on a USB stick drive, and then reformat the laptop and put WinXP Pro on it.

[PCJ]

SZ series rocks, and addresses the battery life drop when going from S3xx --> S4xx --> S5xx series. The Geforce 7400 Go is a nice addition too!

And yes, I agree, Sony does load a bunch of crap on the laptops. First thing I would do is to download the latest drivers from sony.com, put them on a USB stick drive, and then reformat the laptop and put WinXP Pro on it.
Sony did not offer the Event service package that is needed for my FS notebook. They offered several other versions of it, but not the one I need for my function keys. Took me long enough to search the 2 recovery DVDs for it.