Dell XPS15 or XPS17! for Guild wars 2 Etc. Help please.

chrisatron

I need your help guys!

I'm about to buy a laptop however I'm not sure which one to get out of these two.

I want to use it for mainly playing WoW and Guild wars 2 when that comes out, I want the bigger screen but don't know if the 15.6inch will be big enough. Also, do I really need an i7 processor? 

 

Dell XPS 15

2nd generation Intel® Core™ i7-2670QM processor 2.20 GHz with Turbo Boost up to 3.10 GHz

15.6"(40 cm) H6GB⁶WLED TL (1366x768) 720p with 2.0 Mega Pixel Integrated Camera

6GB⁶ Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz

500GB⁷ SATA hard drive (7200RPM)

1GB NVIDIA® GeForce®  GT 525M Graphics Card

Intel® Centrino® Wireless-N 1000 (EUR)

 

Or 

 

Dell XPS 17

XPS L702x (UKI, FCG13UKI) –    i5-2430M (2.40Ghz, 4Threads, 3MB cache)

17.3" (44 cm) HD+ WLED True-Life (1600x900) with 2.0 Mega Pixel Integrated Camera

4GB⁶ Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz

750GB⁷ SATA hard drive (7200RPM)

1GB NVIDIA® GeForce®  GT 550M Graphics Card

Intel® Centrino® Wireless-N 1030 (1x2 b/g/n+ Bluetooth Combo Card)

 

Thanks ^^

-Chris

 

 

 

Quizzical

The correct answer is "neither".  If gaming is the only purpose, then get a desktop if you can.  As compared to a laptop, a desktop will get you better performance, better reliability, and a lower price tag, among other things.  The gap is so large that even if you need both a gaming machine and a laptop, you're often better off getting both a gaming desktop and a cheap laptop than a gaming laptop alone.

Even if it really needs to be a laptop, you're looking at the wrong products entirely.  Dell's gaming laptops are the Alienware M17x and M18x.  If you look at those and say, whoa, those are expensive, then yeah, that's kind of the point.  Dell doesn't do budget gaming laptops, and if that's what you're after, you'll have to buy from a different company.  On a purely performance basis, you can't really justify paying $700 for either of the above systems--and Dell charges a whole lot more than that.

Both of those laptops use Nvidia's low end GF118 chip.  While it can more or less run games, it's not really a gaming GPU chip.  It's not much faster than modern integrated graphics, even.

There are two directions that you could go, really.  One is to pay more for a real gaming laptop.  For that, you'd want a Core i7 2630QM or better processor, and a Radeon HD 6870M or GeForce GTX 560M or better video card.  Occasionally you can find that for about $1000, but more typically, you'll need to spend at least $1200 or so.  Asus and MSI have some options here.  If you really want to go high end, then try a rebranded Clevo P170HM with a Radeon HD 6990M.

The other direction is to save some money and get a Llano system.  If integrated graphics performance is good enough, then just get integrated graphics and skip all of the drawbacks of a discrete card.  Hewlett-Packard seems to be the only company that sells Llano systems suitably configured for gaming.  Their g6z and dv6z quad edition laptops are their options, and go for about $500-$700, depending on how they're configured.

If you want something that straddles the gap between a budget gaming laptop and something more performance-oriented, you can get a Radeon HD 7690M discrete card in the dv6z quad edition, and that's a lot faster than the cards in the laptops you're looking at.  Switching between AMD integrated graphics and an AMD discrete card is also a lot less likely to give you driver headaches than hoping that the drivers for Intel integrated graphics will miraculously work.