Purchasing a GX640: Does it need upgrades?

Hey all, thanks in advance for your advice. You all should know that I know very little about computers. I have read a lot of information and with a budget around $1,200.00, I have settled in on buying a MSI GX640. I do mostly business applications and play only WoW.

What I am interested in is making sure that I am able to game on it for the next 2-3 years in light MMO’s like WoW, since all of my other uses should be minimally demanding. My concern is that I have read a lot about a bottlenecking occurring due to the graphic card be much more powerful then the CPU. Since the game I play doesn’t seem to be too graphically demanding, I am not sure if the cost of upgrading the CPU is even going to provide me any benefit. So, I guess I’m wondering if it really would be worth the extra cost in the long run to upgrade the CPU. What I have found is that you can upgrade the i5-450m to the following w/costs: i5-520 ($259), i7-720m ($250-283), or the i5-540m ($299).
Should I consider any upgrades or just buy it in the configuration it is in?
Please help!

 

I don't think it'l need an upgrade made, Wow takes effect of dual core solutions quite well if i recall so that should run it just fine with the i5, but the quads nothing short either and has turbo boost when cores not in use.

 

Welcome to NBR!

The stock CPU is more than sufficient for your needs. Unless there's something you haven't mentioned, like video rendering or 3D simulation, you probably won't even max out the stock i5 CPU. This laptop runs Crysis on High at 1080p at a stable framerate, so it's safe to assume that it won't have any trouble running WoW at max everything either.

I don't know exactly how CPU-intensive WoW is (I wouldn't touch it with a 20 foot stick) but since it's optimized for dual cores, it's a safe bet that you wouldn't see a benefit from upgrading to a Core i7.

Put your fears to rest, the GX640 is the Tsar Bomba of gaming laptops. It's gonna be obsolete in 6 months, but hey, live for today eh?

 

It's quite a powerful laptop, but you'd have to give the "Tsar Bomba" title to a dual-GPU laptop, I'd say.

 

Thanks, Cata and Dakins for the input.

I don't plan on doing any 3d simulation or video rendering, so it really sounds like the i5 will be plenty for me to do business apps and play WoW.

 

I play wow mostly on it. And never have had an issue. fps are almost always 50+ mostly in the 100's when not in a raid. Except in dal. Dal gets like 15-30 cause there is always something like 2000+ characters there at any given time in my server (maybe exaggerating, but seriously not by much).

 

Overkill for WoW (from what I saw when my room mate played it). BLURAY BLURAY BLURAY. It's frikin' awesome. I'm not exaggerating when I say that you'll think something's wrong with your DVD library after watching a Bluray on a laptop (or a TV for that matter).

 

I wasn't aware there was a blueray in it?

It's not included in the stock setup, is it?

 

No.


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