Dell's World of Warcraft Laptop

Psychor writes "Dell has released a high specification new laptop complete with World of Warcraft branding (Horde and Alliance versions available). With a starting price of $4,499 it's not cheap, but does feature SLI graphics and AGEIA PhysX technology (a laptop first). RAID and solid state storage are also options." Unfortunately for purchasers, the laptop won't boot on tuesday mornings until early afternoon, and some days you just won't be able to log in.

Re:Huh?

[Evangelion]

It's not that arcane. All the WoW realms go down most tuesdays for regular maintenance.

Re:Huh?

[KeatonMill]

Tuesday mornings (US time) are when Blizzard does weekly maintenance on its servers. As for the logging in, the authentication server occasionally crashes meaning that while players who are already logged in can continue playing, no one else can start.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

ermm... why would the CE edition of Burning Crusade fetch upwards of $1200-1500 on eBay? Last I checked, my local Fry's still had stacks of the things for standard retail price.

The rell Dell WoW laptop

[ACMENEWSLLC]

Dell has a Vostro for around $800 US right now which would play WoW very well.

Go here;
http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/vostronb_1500?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd&~tab=bundlestab [dell.com]

Select the smart buy unit and customize the video card & select the 8600GT with 256MB of RAM. Bare in mind this is the DDR2 and not the DDR3 version, so it's not a super quick 8600GT but it's plenty fast for WoW.

The normal site has it for $729 right now. Corporate customers can get a better deal.

Take it to a 2.0Ghz dual core, 2GB RAM standard, the 7200 120MB HD, BlueTooth and the webcam -- a better gaming build, and you are just under $1000.

That's one hell of a deal for decent casual (not extreme) gaming machine..

Re:Is this really needed?

[Garridan]

My first question was, "Is this really worthwhile?" I mean, Xtreme Notebooks [xtremenotebooks.com] has quad core laptops for about half the price of this -- and for that much money, you can get just as good of a video card, 4GB ram, and some beastly hard-drives, too. So what are they charging for? A fancy case-mod?

Re:Is this really needed?

[pabens]

WoW doesnt even support SLI...
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=1610471297&postId=16099064527&sid=1 [wow-europe.com]

Re:Why? Native resolutions.

[gknoy]

.... and once again I misclick the Submit button instead of Preview. Can I get a -1 mod on the parent, and I'll re-post with better formatting? :D

---- what I meant to say was ... -----

Given that World of Warcraft used to run just fine on my old P4 2.0ghz with 512 RAM and a Geforce 4, why on earth would I want to spend such a ludicrous sum of money on a laptop to play it with?

Native laptop resolutions, I suspect.

My home system is an Athlonxp 2200, with a 6600GT. It's somewhat old, but was pretty much Just Fine when I was running at ~1024x768 resolution. I could get most graphical effects, shader stuff, and a good range of "vision". Last December, my family bought me a 24" widescreen LCD. Holy cow. I cannot play at lower than native resolutions. It's physically possible, but it's an assault on my eyes. Thus, I play at full resolution, but absolutely bare minimum graphical settings.

While this laptop is surely overkill (and I'm sure any recent laptop would do Just Fine), there's a reason to have all the bells and whistles. :) If you're buying a warcraft themed laptop you're already in the small group of people with money to burn on crazy stuff like that, so they may as well expect that you as a customer want a machine which is Damnably Good at anything gaming related.

Hence, SLI and PhysX. (I didn't know WoW could even use PhysX?)