All-in-one for WoW (or laptop?)

[Tea]

Hi all,

Mrs Tannin uses her PC for various things, the most demanding of which is playing WoW. She currently has an Acer all-in-one - i5 4460-T 1.9GHz, 8GB, 2TB hard drive, Geforce 840m. It's five years old and getting very sluggish.

Requirements:

In this room, another all-in-one would work much better than a proper standard-box PC. Yep, you can't upgrade them and you can't repair them. We can always just buy another one if the worst comes to the worst. (A small form desktop might be OK instead, but AIO is best.)

It has to play WoW. Blizzard say WoW needs at least a Geforce GTX560 2GB, or Radeon HD7850 2GB, or Intel HD 530 (45W TPD with 8GB system RAM). Forget that last one (do Intel graphics still suck?), and if possible we want to go higher than those minima so as to get a bit more life out of it.

Also,Blizzard say i5-760 or FX-8100 or better. I'm inclined to think i7, but whatever.

Storage: We want a 1TB SSD or better.

Screen: 24 inch or better, and good quality.

Price: not too fussed, though we won't go stupid.

One more possibility which we haven't ruled out: a laptop with a docking station. It's probably not ideal, but offers some advantages.

Thoughts?

 

[Chewy509]

Can't offer any recommendations for an AIO, as pretty much all current models with Intel CPUs all only use Intel HD graphics (which is still questionable performance wise). Most of the AMD based models are using the older A-series instead of Ryzen APUs. Admittedly I could have missed a few, but looking at what's available via typical Australian retail channels, it's limited.

There is the ASUS M241DA with a Ryzen 7 3700U option, but all available models I can find in retail channels limit the SSD to 512GB.

A NUC like the Asus PN50 or one of the new Intel Ghost Canyon NUC kits might be another option. (The former is add RAM and NVMe storage, and the latter, is add RAM, Storage and GPU). The Asus PN50 can be fitted to the back of a monitor via the VESA mount, hence why I'm mentioning it. (Note: the Vega 8 GPU in the Ryzen 4000's is about 50% quicker than the nVidia 840M, so not that much of a GPU upgrade).

 

[Tea]

Thanks Chewy. We will look at those.

 

[Handruin]

I can't remember your affinity toward Dell but would one of their newer laptops be appropriate?

The new Dell 15" XPS looks like a very solid system and if spec'ed appropriately would get you a GTX 1650 Ti, i7-10750H, and 1TB nvme SSD. The downside is you would be paying a premium for the aesthetics of this device.

Dell XPS 9500 Laptop | Dell USA

A 15-inch laptop with an InfinityEdge display and Adobe RGB color. Featuring 10th Gen Intel Core processors, optional 4K display and Dell Mobile Connect.

www.dell.com

Dell also have a gaming series (G5) that might be better suited at a lower price point that also comes with a GTX 1650, i5-10300H, and various storage options. The GTX 1650 Ti should be well-beyond the baseline of a GTX560 requirement for WoW.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/gaming-laptops/sr/game-laptops/g-series

 

[Tea]

I don't mind Dell, Doug. Those look very nice, though very expensive. Is it worth spending that much on a laptop which would nearly always be closed up, running an external screen? Mrs Tannin has an open mind to that. We have also just remembered the second beautiful big, photographic-quality Dell monitor sitting at the other house, idle most of the time. (We can't go there right now because on interstate Covid travel restrictions - or to be precise, we can go over to Victoria any time we like but we can't come back.) Anyway, maybe we should use that, seeing as we already have it, and buy a little box to run it off. I dunno. We are very confused.

Tannin has thrown up his hands and gone outside to continue building the greenhouse. I think I'll join him.

 

[Tea]

Woops! We seem to have ordered a desktop instead.

From memory, it's an i7 with 16GB, a GeForce 1060, and a 1TB SSD. We will pick it up next week.

(I didn't try to pick those components. We have been out of the game for too long. Instead, we picked a chap who we liked and though was trustworthy and said "build us a nice one", going with his recommendation in every case except for hard drive, where we wanted a single big SSD instead of small SSD and magnetic drive.)

 

[Chewy509]

From memory, it's an i7 with 16GB, a GeForce 1060, and a 1TB SSD. We will pick it up next week.

Didn't realise people still had stock of the 1060? (replaced by the 1650 and 1660 over 18mths ago). I assume it's the 6GB version and not the 3GB version?

 

[time]

Might be secondhand? Nothing wrong with that, 1650 is about AU$250. Not much else you can buy right now in Oz.

Agree with Tea's decision, in that OEM will only get you a stupidly small SSD. And pairing an HDD with a small SSD was common several years ago, but it's not a good idea with the bloated software we have today (eg. Windblows). It's a particular pain for gamers because it helps if they can install their games on C drive.

 

[sedrosken]

Personally I still do the small fast/big slow arrangement, but to be fair I swapped the spinning rust for a slower SATA-connected m.2 drive in my case and delegated the mass storage to the server... Except, server's dead now, and my big archives all live on the cold storage drives I backed them up to. I'm going to need to stick a big boy back in here it seems.

 

[Chewy509]

The main reason for mentioning the 1060, (it's IMHO still a decent card even today), was to ensure they weren't paying full price for what is either old stock or as you mention 2nd hand... If they got a good discount on it, then a good buy.