Looking for an absolute cheap laptop (300/400$) to run warband/bannerlord

Hello alll ---

I currently have warband on a nice rig, i am looking to carry around warband though on an adequate laptop.

I am not so familliar with pricing and requirments of all around laptop for these games.

especially if i really just want it for mount and blade on the go.

without having an excess of hard drive space and a limitation on processor/graphics card/gig

could anyone suggest a place or specific laptop to go to?

Thanks in advance

ASUS X54C-BBK19 Refurbished Notebook PC -
2nd generation Intel Core i3-2350M
2.3GHz,
4GB DDR3,
320GB HDD,
DVDRW, 15.6" Display,
Windows 7 Home Premium

integrated graphics --- i dont know bout laptops --- any insight?

Look for one with a dedicated graphics card, integrated graphics is bad for games. You might not find a good enough laptop in that price range.

Think you have to add $200 to that to get something workable, but that's Swedish pricing. As crazyboy11 noted an integrated graphics card won't cut it.

More specifically, in the computer you specified there, CPU and memory are probably OK but graphics card is not.

I think almost ANY computer can run Warband. For instance - my current computer is 5-6 years old, with 64 MB (yes 64 MB!) on-board video card.
I am able to run M&B 1.011 on minimal settings and with 80 soldiers on the battlefield without noticeable lag (25-35 fps), using directX7 rather than directX9 (in configure options).
And Warband - also on minimal settings with 50 soldiers. The lag was far more visible and annoying. If you want to use mods with better textures however (and almost all of them are with better textures) you will run into some problems. The game will run, but will lag awfully.

1) The bare minimum for Warband, with no fancy but good graphics, and NO fps problems is ANY computer with 128 MB video card. Integrated or not.
2) If you want also to enjoy the graphics of the game or some HD mods 256 MB card will do it.
3) And if you want to play with absolutely MAX-ed out graphics any 512 MB video card will  perform more than admirably. All of this is tried and tested. (There won't be much of a difference between 256 and 512, but some guys are performance junkies and consider everything under 120-60 fps to be not good enough.)
4) Read again 1).

That's one of the reasons why I love this game so much!

deutrino said:

1) The bare minimum for Warband, with no fancy but good graphics, and NO fps problems is ANY computer with 128 MB video card. Integrated or not.
2) If you want also to enjoy the graphics of the game or some HD mods 256 MB card will do it.
3) And if you want to play with absolutely MAX-ed out graphics any 512 MB video card will  perform more than admirably. All of this is tried and tested. (There won't be much of a difference between 256 and 512, but some guys are performance junkies and consider everything under 120-60 fps to be not good enough.)
4) Read again 1).

Click to expand...

These aren't good guidelines.

Graphics Memory is incredibly misleading when judging a graphics cards performance, every graphics card/chip has two components that tell you how fast it will be, the VRAM (Video RAM) and GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). Fundamentally it works the same as your CPU/RAM just on it's own card (hence graphics card) and generally handles only graphics processing tasks.

If your GPU isn't fast enough, no amount of extra VRAM will make up for the lack of performance. A better GPU can give you more performance with less VRAM.

Oh and Integrated graphics chips don't have much (if any) VRAM, they often "steal" from your RAM.

Second hand is totally the way to go.  People are throwing out rigs that can maul warband. 

i bought my laptop for 150e about 5 years ago, and it runs warband.

Warband can be played on low-spec laptops, but you will have to be willing to hand in performance. If you want to play lag-free, you are most likely to play on DirectX 7, and low settings to play effectively in MP. I can achieve that with my 4 year old Toshiba Satellite laptop with an integrated video-card, running XP / W7.

It's not much, but its doable. I would recommend buying a laptop that can run it on decent settings, but also for your other activities and games you might want to play on it. If you want better results for your games, then getting a laptop with a dedicated video card is definitely recommend. If you only play Warband and write some text on your laptop, then integrated would be suitable too. Depends for what kind of price you can get a laptop with a dedicated card.

And this:

Jesus YOUR LORD said:

Second hand is totally the way to go.  People are throwing out rigs that can maul warband. 

Click to expand...

I walked in this second-hand shop some days ago. Laptops with decent rigs for not much. The internet, for exmaple eBay, or whatever site is used in your country for selling second-handed stuff, is a great source to look.

It also depends if you're looking at multiplayer or single player. For single player, how big do you want the battle sizer to be.
I have an HP Pavilion g6 with these:

Processor: AMD A6-4400M APU with Radeonn(tm) HD Graphics    (2 CPUs)  ~2.7GHz
Memory: 4096MB RAM
Integrated Graphics, I'm not really sure what the specs specifically of that are :/

And I can run single player and multiplayer perfectly fine (with a mouse!!!). I have to run it on dx7, in multiplayer I've found it helps to lock the framerate at maybe 100 and use the lowest possible graphics settings (can barely read the chat, have to press "l" to see it really). In singleplayer, I can get away with a battlesizer of at least 50, maybe more.

Slisky YOUR LORD said:

Second hand is totally the way to go.  People are throwing out rigs that can maul warband.

Click to expand...

Necro-ing this thread

Does anyone know of any good sites that are selling these used laptops?
I'm going to buy a laptop and I want it to be able to play warband on high settings with still high fps.
There is a $550 one I'm looking at that should easily work but I was wanting to look into any used "out dated" rigs that would still work great for a cheaper price.

Moved this thread to where it belongs.  This section did not exist at the time of the OP.

Moronic said:

Necro-ing this thread

Does anyone know of any good sites that are selling these used laptops?
I'm going to buy a laptop and I want it to be able to play warband on high settings with still high fps.
There is a $550 one I'm looking at that should easily work but I was wanting to look into any used "out dated" rigs that would still work great for a cheaper price.

Click to expand...

Don't buy outdated hardware. Buy low tier modern hardware.

I recently bought one of these: https://www.asus.com/us/Notebooks/X555LA/

It was $340, came with an i3-5020U processor. Quite impressive performance out of such a crapbox, runs Dark Souls 2 at 50-60 FPS, Warband at 30-60 depending on the battle size.

I've been running Warband on my 3 year old HP Pavilion AMD10 quad-core with upgraded ram and integrated video card.  I've never had any problems in single player mode.  I also run engineering graphics programs such as CREO 2, AutoCad 2013 and Inventor on it, sometimes all three at once without any issues.  They've gone down in price considerably since my purchase and I've seen them around for under $500 or even less on sale.  Definitely buy new.

Necro-ing this.

I don't think that used hardware is the way to go. It might break unexpectedly and you also need to take in account the lack of more modern features.

There are quite a few OK laptops that come well within the 400$ price range, and mine is an example:
Lenovo G500
- CPU: Intel Pentium 2020, 2.40GHz (X2 cores);
- GPU: HD 8570M, 1Gb DDR3, 825 MHz core clock speed + integrated Intel;
- 4 Gb RAM;

Runs Warband like butter in Native, and just well in more resource-intensive mods, so it's still enjoyable.
Among that, games like Men of War, The Guild 2 are no problem for it either, but struggles really hard in Company of Heroes and Total War. Massively MP games, such as War Thunder and World of Warships run well only on low to medium.

My laptop runs for 3 years already and never got serviced. In spite of its mediocre gaming abilities, I have to admit it is very well built from a structural point of view and can be cleaned by a 3-year old. The only thing that ever gets dusty is the fan itself, but the other components look brand new, as if they rolled out of the factory yesterday.