Laptop purchasing advice wanted

[achipinthesugar]

It has been a long time since I bought a laptop. I wondered if anyone could point me towards a good place to get one, and maybe suggest some models to look at, given the following criteria.

I'm guessing that in the world of laptops, there's a set of trade-offs between things like thickness, weight, cpu, gpu, battery, etc.

Basically, all I want is pretty good video gaming capability.

I don't care if it's big and heavy, has sucky battery life, comes with windows 7 or even XP… I'm literally not going to use it for anything apart from playing World of Warcraft and Skyrim, which I would like to look nice, and I can play with it plugged into the mains.

I will be using a controller and/or a plugged in mouse, so I don't care about build, or how good the trackpad is, really.

15" or 17", I don't care. I don't want to spend more than $6000, really… but I could.

[flameproof]

I would rather ask in some WOW forums for a suggestion. Gaming is a whole different issue and requites more graphic power then a normal computer.

In the meantime.......: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2020688,00.asp

...I see some pricing issues for you...

[Proplus]

If I remember correctly, WoW is more dependent on the CPU than the GPU.

[Morrison]

Dont buy any and cut your internet connection at home, it gradually works

[ramelec]

Go for a desktop. It is more super powerful

[jimbo]

$6000 is a low budget for what you want it to do.
That's the price for a basic laptop for general use.

Consider a desktop as per ramelec's advice.

[justsomebody2]

You could probably find a old 2nd hand computer for that budget, it'll be hard if you want a new laptop since those comes usually at a premium, another factor is once you throw "gaming" into the formula, the GPU is what jacks the price up, don't let those so called "onboard GPU" fool you when talking to sales at broadway, SSP, etc.. I saw a laptop that has a i7 mobile GPU but comes with a GTX640M or something ridiculous, fast CPU but GPU will choke.

I know WOW can run on a medium spec'd rig, but Skyrim will eat whatever you can throw at it depending on the mods you run, especially the high texture pack.

Just for reference, I recently built a rig for the missus that came out to around $9K for the box alone, specs are: Gigabyte GTX670, i7 3770K, 8GB Corsair Dominator 1600, Intel 240GB SSD, Gigabyte G1 Sniper M3 and including a tower case (SS Fortress 2). She uses it for Diablo3 so it's fine and it'll run WOW and Skyrim easily.

on another note: I think PCMag is biased and favors Dell / Alienware, I can get a MSI notebook with equivalent horsepower for 2/3 of the price.. unless you favor the Alienware style, lightshow and "bling" factor.

[achipinthesugar]

Thank you everyone!

I should clarify... my desktop machine is fine for gaming.

I realise I sounded like I wanted a "gaming rig" for 6k (!), but that's not really the case. I want a normal-priced laptop... it's just that my priority is the gpu, rather than size, weight, battery, etc.

Basically, I spend quite a lot of time in cafes and in our clubhouse killing time inbetween teaching jobs, and I would like to be making skyrim/WoW progress rather than playing some iOS game. I'd be happy to run it on medium settings.

Whenever I go in a Fortress or whatever, I feel like I'm going to get burned by something calling itself a "2GB GPU" that's got an "M" on the end of its name and turns out to be under-powered.

I'm happy to wait through loading times. I'd even be happy with a 15" screen, tbh. The whole thing is pretty confusing.