EDIT: TL;DR: If you do not play LotRO on an Asus Zenbook using the GT620M chipset then there's no need to reply.
So the holidays are nearly upon us, there are tons of sales, and I've got a stack of gift cards burning a hole in my pocket. I was thinking that I might finally replace my 6 year old "couldn't play LotRO if it wanted to" laptop that my wife always complains about being too slow with something a little more useful. I was also thinking that as long as I was looking at new laptops I should get one that I can play LotRO on.
So anyway, I really like the new Ultrabook categories but most of them have the Intel integrated 4000-series graphics, which I can't imagine would be good enough for LotRO. But I also see that Asus has a sub-segment of one of their Zenbook lines (the UX32 models) that has the nVidia GT620M and are priced around $1280 USD. I was looking at a couple of reviews on YouTube, and they indicated that the graphics performance was pretty good for a mobile chipset, and showed several games (Skyrim, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3) running around 30fps on the highest settings at 1920x1080. These laptops are darn sexy, and it seems like they would fit the bill. Is anyone out there playing LotRO who can speak to this device's LotRO-ability?
They've also got a slightly pricier line (the UX51) that is a 15.6" model (versus 13.3"), has 8GB of RAM (vs 4GB), a pair of 128GB SSDs in RAID0 (verus a 500GB 5400 RPM drive), and an nVidia GT650M chipset. Of course that one runs around $1900, but I have no doubts about it's ability to crank out the FPS for LotRO.
I'm just kinda cheap and figure I can bump the 13.3" model to a 256GB SSD + 8GB of RAM for under $200, so unless I really need the faster chipset why pay $500 more?
So the holidays are nearly upon us, there are tons of sales, and I've got a stack of gift cards burning a hole in my pocket. I was thinking that I might finally replace my 6 year old "couldn't play LotRO if it wanted to" laptop that my wife always complains about being too slow with something a little more useful. I was also thinking that as long as I was looking at new laptops I should get one that I can play LotRO on.
So anyway, I really like the new Ultrabook categories but most of them have the Intel integrated 4000-series graphics, which I can't imagine would be good enough for LotRO. But I also see that Asus has a sub-segment of one of their Zenbook lines (the UX32 models) that has the nVidia GT620M and are priced around $1280 USD. I was looking at a couple of reviews on YouTube, and they indicated that the graphics performance was pretty good for a mobile chipset, and showed several games (Skyrim, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3) running around 30fps on the highest settings at 1920x1080. These laptops are darn sexy, and it seems like they would fit the bill. Is anyone out there playing LotRO who can speak to this device's LotRO-ability?
They've also got a slightly pricier line (the UX51) that is a 15.6" model (versus 13.3"), has 8GB of RAM (vs 4GB), a pair of 128GB SSDs in RAID0 (verus a 500GB 5400 RPM drive), and an nVidia GT650M chipset. Of course that one runs around $1900, but I have no doubts about it's ability to crank out the FPS for LotRO.
I'm just kinda cheap and figure I can bump the 13.3" model to a 256GB SSD + 8GB of RAM for under $200, so unless I really need the faster chipset why pay $500 more?