Thinkpads Forum

Hi,

I am wondering if the W520 can play Starcraft 2. People have been saying the Quadro GPU has little difference compared to GeForce, but I found this online:

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/2592646985

Thinkpads aren't gaming rigs, they are geared towards business. If you bought the Quadro to run a CAD app... you should be quite happy, gaming onthe other hand will prolly be a disappointment...

If you'll read through the thread you mentioned, then look through the 1st few links in this google search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Quadro+2 ... 24&cad=cbv

Took me about 15 minutes of reading to see that this card is nothing like the Geforce... it's clocked way lower, has less bandwidth, and is optimized for workstation apps... NOT gaming.

You can prolly run Starcraft 2, but you won't be happy with the framerates.

Dunno how far you read down the thread you linked to, but the blizzard support rep posted:

Davidba - Support Forum Agent wrote: As much as I hate being the bearer of bad news, we are unable to support our games on Quadro cards. Usually SC2 won't even boot on a Quadro card, which at least speaks of how powerful your particular model is. They're specialized cards that are not meant for gaming. Again, I'm pleasantly surprised that the game plays properly for any time at all.

Yeah. I saw the forum that it shouldn't be even be able to run. But I like the W520 very much because it's portability, battery life, and reliability. I don't want to give up on it =(

You said it's clocked way lower. Are you talking about the core speed? And bandwidth?
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-Qua ... 316.0.html

Then, I have a few choices down the line...
1. Asus G73SW(Geforce GTX 460M) - This thing is a beast. It got everything that I would want, but it weighs like a beast too. Battery life isn't that good.

2. Alienware M11x R3(Geforce GT 540M) or M14x(Geforce GT555M) - I don't know which one is more worth it. It's both lightweight, M14x has better performance, but both is not as good as Asus.

3. Dell XPS 15z(Geforce GT 525M) - Lowest performance out of all of these. But people liked this one.

I only want to go with high end brand because it'll last me for many years and all of these are good brands. I checked on notebookcheck.net The Alienwares and the Dell are very noisy =/ Don't know which one to choose. Or anyone can suggest a better laptop

You can customize the Dell with the 540M and FHD screen, which I've heard is pretty decent. Complainers tend to be heard much more often than people who are happy with their notebook. That's not to say Dell might not be noisy, but it kind of skews the perspective. The perfect notebook remains an elusive ideal.

I red on notebookreview that you can run it with a decent FPS (on 2000M)

Thanks for all the responses. I can't find that notebookreview article that one of you mentioned

I narrowed it down to Asus G73SW and Lenovo W520. Still not sure if I want to risk seeing if W520 is able to run games.

I looked up Dell XPS 15z. It has multi-touch display as an option at checkout? o.O I am not sure what that means. I only see multi-touch touchpad online but not the screen.

The Quadro 1000M is actually clocked higher than a GT540M. Being an owner of the W520 with the Quadro 1000M, I can attest that the SCII Demo works with no problems on ultra settings at 1600x900.

kirayamato26 wrote:The Quadro 1000M is actually clocked higher than a GT540M. Being an owner of the W520 with the Quadro 1000M, I can attest that the SCII Demo works with no problems on ultra settings at 1600x900.

For reals? Even with long periods of usage? It doesn't slow down the FPS or crash the computer? People say it works fine till midgame or long hours of playing

The GPU coming out with the W520 is the Quadro 2000M, so that should be even better...

I heard you can overclock it to 460M speeds... Not sure about the stability or how much farther you can go.

Yes, for real. However, you can't play online with the demo, nor am I great at the game. But I haven't experienced any problems. The 2000M is slightly lower clocked than the 460M, and has a narrower memory bus I believe.

I have a W520 with the Core i7 2820QM, 8 GB of RAM and the Quadro 2000 M and have been able to run the following games using high to ultra high settings at 1680x900 minimum without any problems:

- Cities XL 2011
- Dirt 3 (this one is the most GPU intensive I believe)
- Civilization V
- Starcraft II

So I would say that the 2000 M is more than enough for current games.