Laptop -

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gigabyte-P15F-V3-CF1-15-6-Inch-Windows/dp/B00U44D432/ref=dp_ob_title_ce

If I were to only use MGE:XE long view (ie no shaders, bloom etc.. just long view at around 20 cells) would I get a steady 60fps in some of the lag heavy areas of the mainland? (sacred forest region, almalexia etc..)

"Just buy a pc"

How about lyithdonea? (20 cells in MGE, no other graphic extensions)

Depends on which mods but I think you can do it... actually shaders are probably the last thing you'd have to worry about, as the graphics chip is quite fast apparently... I'd say the CPU is the weakest spot here and given that Morrowind can only use one core you should maybe make sure not to use too many script-heavy mods. But graphics-wise you should be on the safe side.

Looks fine to me. That machine is vastly more powerful than anything anyone would have had during the first years Morrowind was available. MGEXE might slow things down somewhat, but that graphics card is far from bad.

I agree, you should be fine with that one.

My experience with MGE XE sans custom shaders is that Morrowind view distance is the biggest FPS killer. Sadly, things like MGE shadows and per-pixel lighting only work inside this view distance.

All

Is a gtx 950m likely to go below 30fps with mods like Lyithdonea?

At 1920x1080, Morrowind runs OK-ish on modern integrated graphics. Single-threaded CPU performance seems to be the bottleneck in crowded towns with many NPC's, statics and activators.

There is no way to be sure about this. Many mods, including this one, push the engine way beyond what it was originally intended for, and at some point it just gets at its limit and FPS decrease drastically. I'm afraid with Morrowind it's not simply "more power = better fps". There's only so much you can get out of a 13 years old engine that was never intended to run on today's hardware with the kind of mods we have today (and yet, it does).

A clear no to that. That laptop is absolutely fine and that graphics chip should handle the game extremely well, but the processor will slow Morrowind down, and I'm not even talking directly about the one in this laptop. Morrowind will run very slowly regardless of how good your rig is, because the support for newer hardware just isn't there. The problem is that Morrowind will only use a single core, which simply isn't enough for such heavy modding. Many people have problems with TR even without that ridiulously high view distance. For me it sometimes drops down to 20 fps with just 13 cells to render in bigger cities. I AM using all of the shaders, but ironically they have 0 fps impact for me, since my graphics card is pretty decent and Morrowind doesn't use a lot of your graphics card anyway.