I am seeking a replacement for a very old Dell XPS 13 with integrated intel hd 3000 graphics onboard. I currently run EVE on the lowest setting at ~30 fps. I would like to run EVE on high settings at high fps.
There are three primary contenders in my search. I am a student and I want a powerful portable laptop that can browse and occasionally play games. Bear in mind that the only games I play are EVE: Online and Final Fantasy XI Online, so I would like to avoid overkill in the graphics department.
Without further ado, these are the machines I am leaning toward:
Interested to hear what the community thinks. Do you have experience playing EVE on any of these machines? Any advice you can share would go a long way. Thanks in advance!
First, go to google and read reviews of each computer. The main problem of laptops is temperature. Even if you have pro hardware for 20k $ the cooling may be bad and after 30 min of playing it become slower than few years old PC. Especially if you live in hot climate area
Looking in specs I can only say that any of them should have no problem with EVE.
I agree with the above, the integrated Intel graphics card isn’t quite sufficient, and the NVIDIA specs look nice but your card is going to overheat like crazy, because laptops simply don’t have the air flow space and the big fans that a desktop has.
In addition, CCP is a bit crazy about always having small fonts in their game, and with a laptop’s smaller screen, you won’t be able to read the menus / market / overview etc.
Yay! I really appreciate your responses. I do live in a very hot and swampy climate so cooling is a factor.
The XPS 13 I currently use has been my workhorse since early 2012. This machine has survived countless falls, salty seaspray, and part of a friend’s beer spilt into the keyboard. She still runs everything I need her to run, however I can tell by the temp and the fan noises that time is leading to her inevitable heat-death.
I have had some success lowering the temp and reducing the overall noise through the use of a zalman notebook cooling pad. I use this whenever I play EVE or run multiple FFXI clients in order to draw heat away from the machine.
Since reading your comments I have added another computer to my list:
I am going to the store this afternoon to feel them out. Another consideration for me is screen brightness: the dimmer the better. I know this is counter-intuitive, but my eyes are very light sensitive.
Does anyone in the community have experience with any of these machines? I would love to hear what you think of them. ^^;
Screen brightness shouldn’t be a problem on laptops, the Windows Control Panel lets you adjust the brightness of the lamps behind the screen to “save battery life” and get it as dim as you want. I’d go for a display that looks crisp and bright, and then go into display preferences / power options / display brightness and lower that see what it looks like.
Adjustable fan speed is usually available with NVidia cards courtesy of MSI Afterburner. Just set up a software-controlled fan speed curve that ramps up the fan RPM’s with the temperature.
Also, as an idea, you can ask the in-store sales people or tech support people if they’ll let you run a downloadable benchmark utility so you can see:
a. An actual score for performance, so you can compare between the machines.
b. How the video cooling system ramps up and how noisy it is under heavy video load.
Forgive me @Errai_Cordallyon, I think you were the pilot that I talked to on Tranquility last night. If not I apologise.
But have you thought about getting a mid range desktop? You don’t need anything super beefy so you wouldn’t have to get a large setup and it shouldn’t cost too much. But cooling will be easier plus you can upgrade desktops easier than you can a laptop
Yes! That was me. I have not thought about getting a desktop. I study astrophysics and I travel a lot so I require a well-built moderately powerful machine with good battery life that I can take with me anywhere. For most my work I SSH into the maverick supercomputer at TACC to look at data from the Hobby Eberly Telescope. The XPS 13 has been sufficient for that purpose. Surprisingly, the XPS 13 holds its own multiboxing 6 characters on FFXI for hours at a time. Does it get loud / hot? Yes. But the notebook cooler helps. And a small part of me really loves to see how far I can push this first generation ultrabook.
At this point I am strongly leaning toward the Dell XPS 15 based on my prior experience with the reliability of the XPS 13. I found this video demonstrating the graphics card used in the XPS 15: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiyYdMH7cN0
This leads me to believe that the XPS 15 will be more than adequate for casually playing older titles like EVE and FFXI. I will probably go for the FHD version for readability of fonts, and for lower power consumption / less heat / longer battery. I will continue to use an external notebook cooler when working under heavier loads to support longevity of the computer. In any case I will probably wait a couple weeks to see if Dell has any plans to update the XPS 15 with the new 8th gen core i7 processors.
