Laptop recomendations

[lilmohi]

I'm looking to buy a high end laptop to play EQ2 on but to be honest i've never bought one before so i'm not sure what to look for in laptops.  Can anyone recomend a good gaming Laptop vendor?  Also with a good laptop does EQ2 run well or should i just forget about it?  I usually build my own desktops so i generally know what system specs to look for but if there is something that is particularly important for laptopos that i should look for in laptops any advice would be appreciated.

[DerDrac]

if you dont "have" to use a laptop i wouldnt. they are meant to be imo portable and light computers for application use. not for gaming. you cant easily upgrade them and they all have heating problems and battery issues when you try to cram that much into a small package. i would personally recommend sticking to desktops and getting a small, widescreen, light, with long lasting battery laptop. you will be more rewarded in the long run with a 6 hour battery life and portability than a 30 min batt life and a 12 pound paperweight. i personally own a dell laptop, 14 inch screen, almost 8 hours on a 9 cell battery. i recommend gateway laptop with 12 cell batts, also small and made with aircraft grade aluminum, which makes it look nice and dissipate heat much better than dells plastic design. if you cant live without one here are some sites to check out. www.portablez.com www.ibuypower.com www.abspc.com www.hypersonicpc.com and of course there's alienware and dell

[lilmohi]

thanks. <img src="/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />

[Umigo]

One thing that is important is ram. Most laptops come with 512Mbytes, you need 1Gbyte min and preferably 2Gbytes. Also watch out for shared memory, where the video uses the main memory. I made this mistake, bought a Compaq Prisario with 1 Gbyte of memory, but missed the fact that 256k was being used by the video. EQ2 plays but the video is VERY poor. If you have the bucks, Alienware makes the ultimate gaming rigs including laptops. But, expect to pay $2,500 - 5,000. The one drawback is when running on battery they are only good for about 1 hour(at least the one I looked at).

[SkinnyFats_EQ2]

<p>I can play eq2 on my (couple of year old) Dell laptop OK.  Not great, but when I can't use my desktop for whatever reason, it still works OK.  And that's in 1680x1050 display mode, which is the display size on my laptop.</p><p>A few things to look out for:  Most laptops have crappy graphics cards, but there are a few options available that help.  Make sure (if you are ordering the machine) that you order it with the best graphics card in it that is available.  Most laptops come with 5400 RPM hard drives standard.  A 7200 RPM drive, while adding cost, will help a lot.  And finally, memory is definitely your friend when it comes to EQII.  One gig minimum, and two gigs will help A LOT.</p><p>Watch the net for Dell laptop coupons.  Occasionally they run 50% off sales.  I got the laptop I play EQII on a couple of years ago for around a thousand bucks.</p><p>Edited to add one thing - while playing EQII, the machine gets HOT.  I mean HOT.  The fan runs at high speed all the time, and the palm rest gets so toasty that I am waving my hands around to de-sweatify them <img src="/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />  Not much you can do about that though - it's the nature of the beasties.</p>

[Lyrisius]

I play EQ2 on my Dell XPS M1710 that I got last summer. I will post the specs further down in this post. Any other configuration that you get today will only be better than what I am using today. I have no problems whatsoever playing on very high detail levels on the native resolution for the XPS which is 1920x1200 (shadows off). When Im at home I usually have it hooked up to a 19" CRT with a lower res (1600x1200), not much difference in fps. It doesnt get very loud even after playing a couple of hours. The fans never spin up to their max while ingame. It is a desktop replacement which means its big with a 17" widescreen, and it get's hot so I wouldn't recommend having it on your lap while playing. But that should be expected when we are talking this kind of hardware. Playing any kind of 3D game you should always have it plugged in as the GPU really needs the extra juice. Even with a 9 cell battery you won't get far. I played Quake 4 with graphics lowered and the lcd screen on half light, and got out about 1 hour and 30 min. Would probably get even less game time with EQ2. The XPS is upgrade friendly which for me means that I upgraded with a bigger harddrive and extra ram just by shopping around on the web and installing it myself, without loosing my warranty. My specs: Processor: Intel Duo-Processor T2400 (1.83 GHz) Memory: 2 GB Dual channel 667 MHz DDR2 Harddrive: 160 GB SATA Video Card: 512 MB Nvidia Geforce Go 7900 GTX Good luck on your laptop hunt, it's a jungle out there, and the laptop market only keeps getting bigger. Sadly the price tags are still quite  high.