Building A Gaming Laptop, Questions

[The Enquirer]

Secondly, is an SSD worth the extra cash spent on it? Some people seem to swear by it but others say it's just a luxury for the folks obsessed with microseconds off their load times.

Don't use it for games. Instead load your operating system onto it. That's really the only use for it. Unless you have a few games in particular you play a real, real lot there is no sense in putting anything other than the OS on there.

 

[OneCatch]

Err.... Rome II Total war is far more intensive that Skyrim. I run Skyrim at a vsynced 60fps maxed out, but can drop down to 20-30 on Rome II on med-high settings. That said, the main bottleneck for Rome II is CPU, but even so it's extremely GPU intensive.

Rome II is largely a poorly optimised game that runs shit on most people's systems, even with the huge CPU reliance.

The patches have alleviated it somewhat, but yeah, it's pretty poorly optimised (not quite as poor as COH2 was when I last tried it imo) . If they just cut the unit animations (which are CPU) for anything not directly in front of the camera and included some decent anti-aliasing it would solve about 80% of the technical gripes that people have.
Regardless, it's still far more GPU intensive than Skyrim though - just wanted to point that out to the OP so he/she didn't expect to be able to get solid 60fps in Rome II with ultra settings.