Dell goes Warcraft crazy
DELL HAS gone bonkers crazy, creating a line of laptops specifically for World of Warcraft fans.
At least, that's what the hype appears to be. The real news seems to tell a different story, however - this is a bog-standard, badly-specced laptop with a bunch of WoW tat thrown in to look hip.
The laptops, which start at around £2,000, are based on the M1730 chassis - a massive 17-inch behemoth with 8700 SLI graphics, a 400GB RAID array and an Ageia Physx processor. The astute amongst you will notice that, in fact, this is complete overkill for any WoW-dedicated machine. Not only does WoW not take advantage of dedicated physics processing, the graphics are so low quality you will get almost no value out of the second SLI graphics card.
Warcraft fans will be getting custom decals on their machines which represent the Alliance or Horde, as well as - gasp - customised desktop wallpapers. Which obviously makes the price tag worth while.
You also get full copies of WoW and the Burning Crusade expansion as well as a couple of strategy guides - although presumably if you're nutty enough to buy a WoW PC, you'll already have those.
The only half-decent extra is a voucher to receive an action figure styled after your in game character. Which is fantastic, but not really worth spending the money on.
Enthusiastic WoW players will surely appreciate a smaller, lighter, slightly less high-end laptop which, whilst still capable of playing on the top graphical settings, will be portable enough to allow them to game anywhere - something that can't be said of the 12lb M1730.
If you really must, you can find out more over here. µ
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Considering that you can get a solid 30 fps @ 768 x 1024 in WOW with a measly GeForce 6200, these notebooks are utterly gratuitous. 

The graphics actually are not low quality.

yes Blizzard have done an excellent job with scalabilty so u can get decent framerates on some extremely old graphics architectures.

But crank those graphics up and crank the resolution up, spell effects, grass clutter density etc then go somewhere like shatt or anywhere where there is alot on screen (alot of characters with spells going on for example) now watch those frames drop like a ton of bricks. (below 30fps) 

The graphics are actually very very well done if you study them. Kudo's to the 3d artists at blizzard they did a top job.
but who says anyone would buy it just to play WoW?



run it at 1920x1200, a 7900 gtx will have some trouble with 4x mutlisample and all settings on high.
Perhaps a hint at a WoW 2 to be released in the near future?.
Or a hint at the large number of people making a bundle selling WoW characters?
There are 2.9 times as many pixels in 1920x1200 as there are in 1024x768, so you're going to need something a bit more powerful than a 6200. Flagship graphics cards for laptops are often substantially detuned compared to their desktop counterparts too.
Yet I note with interest the appearance of a mobile PhysX PPU.
That, at least, is a good thing for future gamers.
actually the foliage is not even coded by blizzard, they buy the trees grass snow and all the plants. Anyone can have plants like them,. in fact ut3 uses the same stuff. NIce job 3rd party company, if you like them you can have them too.
My social life is as interesting as a magician on the radio (I'm on a gap year and all my friends have gone to uni) and as a result, I refuse to try WOW simply because joining the socially inept in an online world, rather than the real world, just doesn't really do it for me.

To cd, I have to ask, who on earth wants to study graphics? I want to fire up Crysis on my big-ass widescreen and be wow'ed (snigger) all the way through.
More than "low quality" they are low texture res - more precisely, the cartoony style of the graphics requires less texture/polygons than a more "realistic" (e.g. Lotro) style of graphics.

On the subject, the laptop is obviously overkill for WoW, but the extra "oooomph" may be used in other more demanding games.

Would I buy this?

Hell no...

Even if I wanted a top of the line gaming laptop, I'd buy a WoW themed one only if I was a fan, and, as the article said, a WoW fan Is more than likely to already have a good part of the goodies (btw, do they include the art book that came with the CE? IMO it was the best thing in the package).
Wow looks damn nice when on full settings! Fact! Although this laptop should be aimed more at UT3 gamers with the AGEIA card in. Thats its best selling point. 

My poor old inspiron 9400 is suffering with a nvidia 7900gs for crysis and ut3 :-( 

Wow runs damn nice though with all settings turned up at 1920x1200