Guild Wars 2 Laptop Guide

<b>Guild Wars 2 Laptop Guide v3.0</b><br />
Now that GW2 has been released, it’s time for an update to this guide. This is not the final version yet, as it doesn’t include laptop recommendations yet if I ever get around to doing it.

Also, preferably ask your questions on the forums, I don’t always check my private messages, I don’t know the answer to everything either so you will get a reply faster if you post in the forum. Also, your experience might be invaluable to others who will encounter the same situation as you.

This guide is meant to help you decide which laptop to get, but in the end, you know best what you need and you will also have to do your own research for certain details.

A few important facts

For now I don’t have a whole lot of actual data on mobile GPUs so some of the recommendations are still educated guesses, if you want to post results for your average framerate with a laptop, feel free to do so in this thread.

The first thing everyone should know is that there is no way for a laptop to be better than a desktop in terms of price/performance and that high end desktop hardware is faster than high end laptop hardware. There is no getting around that fact. The main reasons for wanting a laptop are the portability and lack of desk space.

Laptops being so small also mean that the components tend to run hotter than their desktop counterparts. There is a section on thermals later on in this guide that includes what should be considered dangerous temperatures and what should not.

The size of a laptop has a big impact on the performance of the components that can be put inside it. That means that there is no way to fit gaming laptop grade hardware in an ultrabook. In short, you’ll have to compromise on size for more performance or compromise on performance for a smaller laptop. There are some pretty balance laptops out there in terms of size and performance though.

Laptops also have the huge drawback of very limited upgradeability. There are very few laptops where you can upgrade the video card. I’ll get to those in the section about upgrades. The most commonly upgradeable components are the RAM and hard drive. Be warned though, some laptops, especially ultrabooks have the RAM soldered to the motherboard and may use a proprietary hard drive form factor and/or connector which severely limit upgradeability. You can go with the rule that the smaller and thinner it is, the less likely it’s going to be self-upgradeable. It is something to check for and to take into account since when your laptop is going to be a tad old; you’ll have to replace it altogether rather than upgrading it.

A little bit on Apple laptops since macbooks are popular. The first thing you should know is that if you want to run GW2 on a mac, you’ll want to bootcamp into Windows, there is no mac version of GW2 and running windows through a VM like Parallels or using an emulator like wine will result in a performance hit. There are still some macbooks that pack decent hardware like the Macbook Pro Retina as long as you run the game at a resolution of 1920x1200 or lower. Forget about running GW2 at the native resolution of the MBPr. Also be warned that the thermal design of macbooks isn’t very good, so your macbook will run hot. The MBPr gets a special mention here because Apple has improved the thermals somewhat, it still runs hot, but it’s not as outrageous as it used to be.

Where can I find reviews of laptops
There are many laptop review sites, my own two favorites are Anandtech and notebookreview. Those aren’t the only ones, but I prefer the reviews from those two. If it’s user reviews you want, you can check for short reviews on newegg for example, but if you want more in depth reviews, there are quite a few on the notebookreview forums. Hardware Canucks also gets a mention from me, I don’t like their reviews as much but they’re good nonetheless.

Recommendations Roundup

CPU: core i7 (preferable) or core i5
HDD: 7200RPM of the capacity you need or better
RAM: 8GB
GPU by resolution for medium-high or better:
1366x768 nVidia: GT540m, GT630m, GT640m LE
1366x768 AMD: HD5670m, GHD6670m, HD7670m
1600x900 nVidia: GT555m, GT640m
1600x900 AMD: HD5770m, HDHD6770m, HD7750m
1920x1080 nVidia: GTX460m, GTX470m, GTX485m, GTX560m, GTX570m, GTX580m, GT650m (GDDR5), GTX660m, GTX670m, GTX675m, GTX680m
1920x1080 AMD: HD5870m, HD6870m, HD6970m, HD6990m, HD7850m, HD7870m, HD7970m
Note that less powerful GPUs will run the game just fine depending on your resolution, but you will have to sacrifice settings in order to get a playable framerate.

List of laptops

This list is a work in progress and the laptops listed here aren't the only options.

Top Mobile Gaming Performance

Alienware m18x: It has an aluminum chassis, sports dual GPUs and is enormous. Given the right configuration it is a very strong performer albeit an expensive one.
Sager NP9370: Another dual GPU monster, this one is at 17"
Sager NP9170: At 17", it isn't small, but you can pack a GTX680m in it as well as a quad core making it s strong contender if you're after performance rather than size.
Alienware m17x: Isn't made of aluminum like it's bigger brother and it screams gamer, but it packs the same punch as the NP9170 depending on the configuration
Sager NP9150: The 15" brother of the NP9170, can also be configured with top of the line mobile GPUs.
MSI GT70: I don't really like the looks of that one, but you can't argue with some configurations, it's a 17"
MSI GT60: Essentially the little 15" brother of the GT70.

High End Mobile Gaming Performance

Sager NP9130
Sager NP6370
Sager NP6350
Asus G75
Asus G55
Lenovo Y580
MSI GE70
MSI GE60
Macbook Pro retina (it's GT650m is overclocked to 660m levels)

Mid-Range Gaming Performance

HP Envy 17
HP Envy 15
HP DV-6T
Sager NP6175
Sager NP6165
Asus N76Vz
Asus N56Vz
Asus U500
Sony SVS15
Alienware m14x

Small and Thin and Light

Sager NP6110
Sony SVS13
Alienware m11x
Gigabyte U2442N

Business Notebooks

Like i mention in the guide, professional GPUs aren't meant for gaming, but you can still game on them so if you want a mobile workstation that can game, here they are.

Lenovo Thinkpad W530
HP Elitebook 8570w
HP Elitebook 8770w
Dell Precision M4700
Dell Precision M6700

Hardware Components

Now on to the hardware components that you will need to run GW2, I will break them down by category and also break down the GPUs by resolution. You can also refer to dhatcher1’s chart here: http://www.guildwars...nd-resolution/. Note that it hasn’t been updated since launch so it’s a good guesstimate.

Central Processing Units (CPUs or Processors)

At this point, it’s no secret that GW2 likes quad cores, dual cores are still fine, but a quad core is preferred and an Intel quad core at that.

Why Intel, the answer is simple, if you though that AMD had a lackluster desktop offering, you haven’t seen their laptop offerings aside from Llano and Trinity which have found their niche in the bang for the buck. Other mobile AMD CPUs aren’t even worth considering for gaming and you won’t see many notebooks using them anyways.

Some naming conventions from Intel:
Pentium: The lowest of the low end of Intel’s line with no Turbo Boost or Hyperthreading
Core i3: Entry dual core with Hyperthreading and no Turbo Boost
Core i5: Mid to high end dual core with Turbo Boost and Hyperthreading
Core i7: High end dual core and quad cores with turbo boost and Hyperthreading
CPU models ending in m: dual core CPUs
CPU models ending in qm: quad core CPUs
CPU models ending in xm: extreme edition quad cores, super expensive, but they come with unlocked multipliers and can even match desktop CPUs given adequate cooling.
ULV: Ultra Low Voltage, in short, you don’t want those for gaming.
Core i#-###: First generation of Core i CPUs (Arrandale and clarksfield), 2010 tech
Core i#-2###: Second generation of core i CPUs (Sandy Bridge), 2011 tech
Core i#-3###: Third generation of core i CPUs (Ivy Bridge), 2012 tech, aka the ones you want.
Now that I’ve thrown features like Turbo Boost and Hyperthreading your way, read the spoiler to know what those are exactly. I should add that GW2 does take advantage of Hyperthreading somewhat.
Spoiler 

First turbo boost. I'll take the i7-720qm as an example to explain since it's the one in my G73JH and i know the clock speeds without having to look all over the net. You'll see clock speed specifications for this processor like this: 1.6-2.8GHz. This doesn't mean that the CPU will always run at 2.8GHz, the higher the clock speed on a given processor, the more heat is generated and obviously Intel designs their processor so that laptops will be able to keep them cool. The numbers mean that the i7-720qm when using all 4 cores will be clocked at 1.6GHz in order to avoid generating too much heat for the laptop to handle. However if you aren't doing something CPU intensive or that is multi-threaded you don't need 4 cores. Let's say that you are only using firefox, for that one core is more than enough. Turbo boost will "shut down" the other three cores and raise the clock speed of the core being used up to 2.8GHz, on 2 cores the 720qm will run at 2.4GHz, and still stay within the manufacturer's design specifications in terms of heat generated. Of course, Turbo boost isn't perfect but it will still increase performance when using less cores and is a neat feature. Here's a link explaining it more in detail: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2832/4.

Now on hyperthreading (HT). Hyperthreading basically meant that per core you can send 2 threads to the execution unit (the part of the core that executes the instructions). Now since you have two threads and only one execution unit you won't be able to process the instructions for the two threads at the same. Let's say that you are processing thread 1 needs information that isn't immediately available, thread 1 will stall the execution will switch to thread 2 until thread 1 has the information it needs to continue or it stalls. This doesn't result in the performance on 8 cores even if you see 8 cores in the task manager. It's even possible that you won't see an increase in performance depending on what you are doing. HT very rarely results in a loss of performance and a minimal one at that if it happens so that it won't affect you. Here are few links on HT for those interested in more details: http://www.makeuseof...logy-explained/ http://www.anandtech.com/show/2542/4 http://www.overclock...-explained.html.

I’ll conclude the CPU chapter with a small section on AMD Llano and Trinity. Trinity is basically the Llano refresh for those of you who don’t keep up with tech news. Llano won’t beat an Intel CPU with a good dedicated GPU, but Llano CPUs overclock very easily and safely at that making them a great budget option for gaming on a laptop. Anandtech’s thoughs on Llano: : http://www.anandtech...-apu-a8-3500m/1 and on Trinity: http://www.anandtech...600m-a-new-hope. Asymmetric crossfire also deserves a mention here since it allows you to use an AMD mobile GPU along with the integrated graphics on Llano and Trinity for better gaming performance. The last time I checked, drivers still needed work, but that was a couple of months ago so I expect that right now (September 2012) it’s better.

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs)

If you plan on gaming on a laptop, the most important part will be the GPU, the processor also plays it’s part obviously, but the GPU will be the bottleneck in most cases. I will list the GPUs required for med-high or better at the most commonly used resolutions. Sorry guys, 16:10 is dying so I won’t list those, I will list them by the three main 16:9 resolution. Also, always assume equivalent or better. You can also check: http://www.notebookc...ards.130.0.html. It’s not entirely accurate, but it’s the best we’ve got.

1366x768 nVidia: GT540m, GT630m, GT640m LE
1366x768 AMD: HD5670m, GHD6670m, HD7670m
1600x900 nVidia: GT555m, GT640m
1600x900 AMD: HD5770m, HDHD6770m, HD7750m
1920x1080 nVidia: GTX460m, GTX470m, GTX485m, GTX560m, GTX570m, GTX580m, GT650m (GDDR5), GTX660m, GTX670m, GTX675m, GTX680m
1920x1080 AMD: HD5870m, HD6870m, HD6970m, HD6990m, HD7850m, HD7870m, HD7970m
I want to max the game, can I do it on a laptop?

Short of getting a laptop with dual GPUs, no you can’t. Even a single 680m will take a major performance hit with supersampling, it’ll probably cut it with a decent overclock, but barely. There aren’t that many laptops that can run dual GPUs either, right now there is the Alienware m18x and Clevo will offer something eventually too, they had to delay the launch of their dual GPU model because of a motherboard design problem, but they’ll get it to market eventually if they haven’t yet.

I have a laptop with integrated graphics, can I run the game?

If you have an HD3000 or better on the Intel side, it won’t be pretty, but it will run at low resolutions and the lowest settings.

If you happen to have a Llano or Trinity laptop (AMD A6, A8, A10), the situation is better, at low resolutions and with an overclock to the CPU (the lower end Llanos are a bit weak in terms of CPU performance) you’ll be able to get somewhere around medium at low resolutions.

Is there anything else I should know about GPUs?

As a matter of fact there is, it’s not as critical as know which GPU gives what kind of performance, but there are technicalities that could come to bite you in the rear so I will cover those.

The first thing you should know is that AMD is having issues with Enduro (their answer to nVidia’s Optimus) meaning that performance for the 7970m and other HD7000m GPUs suffers a bit with Enduro enabled. They are working on it and I expect they’ll fix it eventually, but it is something to be aware of. Alienware laptops like the m17x allow you to disable Enduro though which will take care of the performance problem at the cost of battery life.

Video memory or VRAM is also an important factor. Currently, you will see video cards with GDDR3 or GDDR5 VRAM. The difference is rather important, GDDR5 has twice the bandwidth of GDDR3, this doesn’t make that much of a difference with lower end GPUs, but it is actually important with higher end GPUs like the GT650m. The GDDR5 650m will perform faster than its GDDR3 counterpart.

Next is memory bus width, the bus width (128-bit, 192-bit, 256-bit, etc.) will have an impact on how fast the GPU can send and receive data to the VRAM and that is also important with higher end GPUs. For the current generation of mobile GPUs, there isn’t any bus bandwidth fiasco like the previous generations as far as I’m aware. In the previous generation, the GTX560m for example came with a 128-bit bus or a 192-bit bus depending on the amount of VRAM and again the 192-bit version performed better than the 128-bit one. If you’re buying a new laptop, this won’t be a concern though, but I’ll still mention it in case nvidia and AMD decide to make a mess of things sometime in the future.

The amount of memory is no longer an issue now either, even Apple saw the light and decided to use decent amounts of VRAM on their GPUs (1GB finally) so you won’t have to worry about not having enough VRAM. You should know though that, aside from the very high end mobile GPUs, 1GB is enough since the GPU isn’t fast enough to use more than 1GB efficiently. Unless there is a difference in bus width, you won’t really see a difference between 1GB or more VRAM.

I’ll also mention clock speeds, there are some laptops where the GPU is either underclocked or overclocked. An underclocked GPU is usually the result of poor thermal design because the notebook can’t handle the heat from the GPU at stock clocks. There aren’t that many factory overclocked GPUs in laptops, but the Macbook Pro Retina deserves a mention here, its GT650m is overclocked to the point where it performs just like a GTX660m.

Finally, the professional GPUs like the AMD firepro and nVidia quadro. Those aren’t meant for gaming in the sense that their drivers are optimized for CAD work. You can still game on them, but expect a small performance hit compared to their gaming counterparts. This means for example that a Quadro K5000m will perform a tad slower than a GTX680m in games, not to mention that the K5000m costs over 1000$. Yep, pro grade GPUs are expensive due to multiple factors which I won’t discuss.

RAM

There isn’t much to say about RAM aside that I personally recommend 6GB or more, but that 4GB is enough for GW2 if you don’t go nuts with other programs at the same time.

Hard Drives (HDD) and SSDs

Again, not much to say here aside that if you go for a HDD instead of a SSD go for a 7200RPM drive if possible, access times are better than a 5400RPM drive.

If you want a SSD, well all SSDs are 2.5mm drives so unless you have a laptop that requires a 7mm height drive, any SSD will fit in your laptop easily.

There is a SSD form factor that is becoming more popular for laptops: mSATA. A mSATA SSD is very small and can allow even smaller notebooks to have dual drives either in the form of a SSD cache and a HDD or two separate drives. A mSATA SSD has the same form factor as a full-height mPCI-E card, but the pin layout is different so don’t think you can use a mSATA SSD in a mPCI-E connector.

Wireless Adapters

Some of you might be wondering why I’m mentioning this because every laptop now comes with one. Let me put it bluntly, most wireless adapters you see in laptops are either crap or average. The amount of crappy low end Atheros adapters you find in notebooks is staggering. If you have the option, got for a high end Intel adapter (Intel 6200 or better) a high end Atheros (yep, the high end ones are actually good) or a Bigfoot adapter (actually a high end Atheros in disguise). Now if the Intel adapter upgrade is 20$ and the bigfoot is 60$, do yourself a favor and get the Intel, the bigfoots aren’t 60$ good. Sometimes it’s impossible to configure the wireless adapter though and you’re stuck with whatever comes by default.

LCD Panel

I’m dedicating a section to the LCD panels this time simply almost every 1366x768 laptop panel out there is junk. By junk I don’t mean black and white era or that it’ll fail after a few months, but in terms of color and image quality, you can’t really go lower than that. Now you’re pretty much stuck with one on low budgets and they’re usable. 1600x900 and 1920x1080 TN panels vary in quality but are usually good. They are no e-IPs or IPS displays, but the colors and color accuracy are better. Read Anandtech reviews of laptops if you’re interested in a good breakdown of displays. You don’t need a 300$ RGB LED IPS panel to get a good image, but the bottom of the barrel panels are still disappointing.

Other Hardware

There are other hardware components that I haven’t mentioned like touchpad, keyboard, LAN adapter. Those are pretty variable from notebook to notebook and are better left to full-fledged reviews.

Size, Weight, Noise and Battery Life

This one gets its own section because since a laptop is meant for portability (or transportability in some cases), weight and battery life deserve their own section separate from hardware. The size, weight and battery life of a laptop are directly related to its hardware configuration. Higher end components, larger screens all contribute to a higher power consumption which in turns means lower battery life. GPUs are one of the main factors of battery life and the faster ones are real battery vampires. On the bright side, switchable graphics came to the rescue, switchable graphics (Optimus or Enduro) will switch to the IGP when you’re not doing anything intensive thus saving battery live and switch to the GPU when you’re doing something that requires more graphic performance, the switch should be automatic. Not all laptops have switchable graphics though; the Asus G series for example doesn’t have Optimus contrarily to Alienware and Clevo.

If you are wondering what hardware configuration has to do with size and weight: everything. The larger the laptop, the more materials it will have which means increased weight. The other main reason for increased weight is the cooling system; the cooling system on a laptop is made of metals like copper and aluminium. You can’t cool a GTX680m and a core i7 with a small heatsink, most laptops with those components use two separate ones, one for the GPU and one for the CPU as a matter of fact. If you want high end performance you have to be willing to sacrifice size and weight in order to accommodate the components and the cooling system.

Finally, noise, that one is pretty variable too. You can have a laptop packing high end hardware that has low noise levels and a laptop with much weaker hardware that sounds like a jet engine. That is something that is better left to reviews as well. Some laptops are engineered with noise in mind, others not.

Thermals and Maintenance

I’ll start the part on thermals by saying that the belief of laptops overheating because laptops overheat in general is a complete myth. Laptops overheat because of improper maintenance, improper use, something broken or bad thermal design. I’ll get to those three shortly, but before, I will give a list of various components and general rules of thumb as to what are safe temperatures and when you should worry. Temperatures will be listed in Celsius, if you want them Fahrenheit, you’ll have to do the conversion yourself.
CPU: 70C to 80C or below is considered safe, 80C to 90C is in the you should worry and anything above 90C means do something now. Current Intel CPUs are rated for up to 100C
GPU: 80C to 90C or below is in general just fine, 100C is where you know there is something wrong. Note that specs may vary more per GPU, but those temps apply to most of the ones currently available in notebooks.
HDD: Anything below 40C is perfectly acceptable, once you are nearing 50C, it’s time to worry and 60C will be harmful to your HDD
The rest doesn’t usually have temperature sensors and isn’t prone to overheating anyways. You might want to keep an eye on the chipset temperature, but that’s usually the last thing that will overheat.
So now that you have an idea of what’s dangerous and what isn’t, you want to keep an eye on your laptop’s thermals. Fear not, here is a list of utilities that you can use:
HWmonitor
HWiNFO
GPU-Z
CrystalDiskInfo
Now, I’ll discuss the various factors that cause overheating. First on the list is bad thermal design, that one is a total screw up on the manufacturer’s part and is a textbook example of a badly designed product. Bad thermal design is the only thing you can’t do something about it aside from returning the laptop or claiming the warranty. This illustrates the importance of looking for reviews and user experiences.

Improper use that will cause overheating is usually because of insufficient airflow. Putting a laptop that has its fan intakes on the bottom on the bed or couch is a good way to cause heat related problems. Some notebooks take their air from the top or side which means that it isn’t as much of a problem, but I still don’t recommend it.

Improper maintenance is obviously not taking care of your laptop. You don’t have to baby it, but you still have to make sure the heatsink(s) is(are) clean. The easiest way to do this will cost you 0$ and take a whopping 5 minutes. Get a can of compressed gas meant for dusting electronics, they are easy to find too, and simply blow short bursts through the air intake. If you’re worried about the fan bearings, you can use something like a paperclip to make sure it doesn’t spin. You should do this every few months; notebooks gather dust faster than desktops. If you smoke or have pets like dogs and cats, you’ll want to do that monthly instead. None of my notebooks have overheated because I am taking care of them. Below, you can see a log of the average CPU temperature for all 4 cores on my laptop on a period of a little over a year.

Attached File  July_2012_CPU.png   272.58K   32 downloads

Here is what your heatsink may look like if you do not take care of it. Don't be a sucker and dust that thing before it becomes that bad. Credit for these pictures goes to Gentech PC, i just borrowed them. :o

Attached File  GT780RMA-1.JPG   114.73K   59 downloadsAttached File  GT780RMA-2.JPG   75.02K   59 downloads

If you want to take maintenance to the next level, it’s going to require a little bit more skills. You can remove the laptop’s back panel and remove the fan is possible to dust the fan and heatsink separately. Make sure the battery is removed and the laptop is unplugged if you do this. You can also go further with the disassembly and completely remove the heatsink to clean it, but I that is something reserved only for the more tech savvy owners. If you feel uncomfortable about doing this, then don’t do it and just use aircans like I first described. The difficulty of disassembly varies from laptop to laptop, my G73Jh is probably the best example of an overly complicated disassembly if you want to get to the heatsinks.

Finally, defective components are the last possible source of overheating. If your fan breaks, you’ll need to have it replaced, same with thermal paste that degrades or broken heatpipes. Those cases are pretty rare, but can happen. If your laptop is under warranty, claim it. If you’re out of warranty, you can order the parts do it yourself which again is for power users or have a technician do it for you. It will cost you money to have a technician do it, but a technician knows what he’s doing.

Upgrades

So, you want to upgrade your laptop or want to know what you can upgrade. There are some components that are easy to upgrade and others that aren’t. I’ll go through both starting with the easy ones. There are always rare cases where the usually easy upgrades aren’t easy though. Also don’t forget that the level of upgradeability varies from laptop to laptop.

HDD and SSD

This is one of the most straightforward upgrade for most laptops. The procedure boils down to open the laptop’s back panel, remove the old drive and replace it with the new one. You will of course have to either clone your old drive to the new one or reinstall windows and your programs. Most laptop manufacturers provide instructions on how to do this and this won’t void your warranty.

RAM

Upgrading your RAM is as straightforward as upgrading the hard drive. Remove the access panel, remove the old RAM and pop the new one back in. That procedure should once again be detailed by the manufacturer or their tech support should be able to provide it. Upgrading the RAM won’t void the warranty either.

Wireless Adapter

Upgrading the wireless adapter can be very easy, tricky or downright impossible. If the adapter is easily accessible, it boils down to delicately unplugging the antennas, removing two screws, doing the swap, screwing the new adapter back in place and plugging the antennas on the new adapter. There are two form factors for wireless adapters, full-height which you won’t find in any recent notebook (it pretty much died in 2009) and half-height which is the one in use right now.

CPU

That one will void your warranty, so attempt it at your own risks. Upgrading the CPU is possible in most notebooks, but often requires a hefty disassembly. If you ever want to attempt it, you will have to find a disassembly guide on your own. This is something I do not recommend to others. I’ve done it, I wouldn’t mind doing it again, but I’m crazy and know that this is something only the most tech savvy users can do safely.

GPU

GPUs aren’t upgradeable in probably over 99% of all available laptops. Notable exceptions include Alienware, Clevo, MSI and mobile workstations are notable exceptions. If you have one of those laptops, they use either MXM type A or MXM type B GPUs. Note that you won’t be able to upgrade to anything, your bios has to support the new GPU and the heatsink also needs to fit. Only when those conditions are met will you be able to upgrade the GPU. Below, you can see a non-standard Asus MXM type B HD5870m (green PCB) and a Clevo HD6970m (cyan PCB) which follows the standard MXM 3.0 type B layout. If you want to upgrade your GPU because your laptop has a MXM connector, it’s best to inquire as to what you can upgrade to. The upgrade won’t be cheap either, currently a GTX680m runs in the 500$ range.

Attached File  SANY0051.JPG   175.57K   33 downloads

Other Components

There are a few other components that can be upgraded like the LCD panel under the right circumstances. I won’t detail those; you’ll have to look on your own if you’re interested in doing that.

FAQ

Q: Your previous guide included gaming laptop recommendations and the new one doesn’t, why not?
A: I might get around to it eventually, the recommendations were outdated and had to go anyways.

Q: I saw Clevo mentioned a few times, but I never head of them, where can I get a Clevo notebook?
A: Clevo doesn’t sell their laptops directly; they sell them to resellers and builders that sell them under their own brand name. Sager is an example of a Clevo builder and reseller. If you see a configurable gaming laptop that isn’t an alienware, it’s usually a Clevo

Q: There is no section on overclocking in this version, why not?
A: I decided not to give it a section in this guide because overclocking can be dangerous, I may add one at a later date though, but I need to think of how I’m gonna phrase the whole thing before I even think of adding one.

Q: If I have a laptop related question, where can I post it?
A: Anywhere in the technical support forum, but keeping everything in this thread might make things easier to find in the future.

Q: I noticed other smaller sections of the previous guide aren’t present either, what aren’t they there?
A: They weren’t as detailed as I would have liked and there are better guides on how to handle that on the Internet or even here on GW2Guru.

Q: Will you update this guide periodically?
A: I don’t plan to update it on a regular schedule, but I do plan to update it. You might see some sections make their return, if there is any important news; I will update the guide as well. I may eventually include a list of recommended laptops.

Q: I preferred the old version of this guide; can you revert back to it?
A: No, I won’t revert back to the previous version, but leave a post in this thread as to what you’d like to see make a return. I do have a backup of the old version so I still have access to everything that was previously present so I can always put some info back by popular demand.