Dell XPS questions

[cmeche]

Wife finally gave in and suggested that she would prefer getting a laptop so it would take up "less space" than my 5 year old pc. The PC is ok to do instances with.....but it is a pain in the ass to actually get to the instance with 5 toons loaded. PvP is what i mainly like to do, but I can only run 2 toons without running into lag problems. My goal here is to run at least 4 toons and do BGs.

So looking at the DELL XPS series, I was wondering what minimum specs i should look for to run 4 toons with low settings in a pvp enviroment? I noticed that they only offer the core 2 duo in the xps series while the ailenware series have the quadcore option and sli. Is the quad and sli pretty much overkill to run 4 maybe 5 toons. Also what amount of ram would be recommended?

There is alos an option of a "gaming xps ('http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/xpslt_alt?c=us&cs=19&l=en&ref=lthp&s=dhs')"...which is cheaper than the ailenware but more expensive that the regular xps line....would this be a little overkill too? I would like to be futureproof to an extent, but budget is around $1500 i guess.

[Starbuck_Jones]

Dell is discontinueing its XPS line. There was no reason for them to have competeing gameing lines. XPS vs Alienware. For a portable to multibox. Get a quadcore cpu and 8gigs of ram with a 64bit OS and you should be fine. All of the xps/aw boxes are going to have video cards that will do just fine. Also be sure you symlink your wow folders so your not thrashing the 5200-7200 rpm hdd that they have or go solid state raid 0 that some offer but thats overkill in my opinion.

[cmeche]

Well, how would this do? ('http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=dycwfn1&c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&kc=laptop-studio-xps-16')

It looks like going the quad core route is just to expensive.

[MarkHR]

sThere are two xps desktops in use here. Unfortunately I only have access to one for wow. In my experince the after sales service is better than average to good but, especially recently, trying to deal with xps sales was a headache (incompatible components listed on the website, cancelled orders, etc.) Basically, try alienware but only if you can get some personal recommendations for their sales/after sales service.

Reading the above posts about xps being terminated/eol'ed it sounds like a sensible thing as the alienware gaming comps make some of the xps gamer setups look very weak. Also might explain the increased hastle with dealing with xps and dell.