Fri Jul 22, 2016 9:46 am by bob
Gaming notebooks are hard, and will just suck in comparison to a desktop with equivalently positioned/numbered parts, and you will make compromises no matter how much you spend.
My thoughts are:
- The CPU is decent, and the 2nd(?) from the top level of notebook class chips.
- 16GB RAM should be OK. From what I've seen, it'll run 5 instances of WoW.
- 1TB HDD. Sucky, but SSD's cost more. This will hurt you in performance no matter where you turn. I couldn't go back to purely mechanical drive systems these days. I would try and spring for at least the 128GB SSD option to run the OS and one game install (i.e. WoW).
- 960M 2GB. Might be OK. Some digging around shows approximate equivalency with some other (desktop) chips (750Ti, 7970) that performed reasonably well (in their time), but those tended to have more vRAM, and desktop cards could be clocked higher. But I don't have a huge experience with 5 instances of WoW, so someone with some may be able to provide better insight here. Higher FPS on 5 instances of games is tricky at the best of times.
- 1920x1080 display. Great stuff. 4K on a notebook looks pretty but to game on it (multiboxing), even with a 980M, is just asking for compromises the reduction in graphics quality/performance to poor levels. Plus you normally need to disable display scaling, which makes everything really tiny.
But all that said. It is what it is. You can only pay what you are comfortable paying, so buy what you can/are comfortable paying for.
p.s. I have no idea what specs you have now, so hard to say whether your choice is a notable jump.
p.p.s Have you tried monitoring your current setup to see where the performance is being hit ?