New Laptop
- Thread starter The Sloth
- Start date
- Joined
- Oct 8, 2009
- Messages
- 3,218
The GPU is pretty low end. But, if Mac starts supporting the Source games it shouldn't have a problem. But Mac doesn't support many games anyways.
I have an ASUS notebook which uses the 9300m , core 2 @ 2.0ghz and 4 gigs of DDR2 800 RAM. You would need to play most source games on low settings, low resolution. I would play at the max supported 1280x800 and frames would dip to 10 in L4D ( the first one ) , and average around 25-30 which i thought was playable til i set up my desktop rig last year.
Is it a must you get the Macbook? There are some very nice gaming notebooks that will play with much better settings and much better performance. Here is one for example...
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Asus+-+...lack/9736955.p?id=1218164036446&skuId=9736955
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Asus+-+...lack/9556125.p?id=1218124208054&skuId=9556125
I would opt for the first , the second is rather large. As far as GPU's, they are basically the same except the first link with the GTX 360m has higher clock speeds compared to the larger notebooks GTX 260m.
Is it a must you get the Macbook? There are some very nice gaming notebooks that will play with much better settings and much better performance. Here is one for example...
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Asus+-+...lack/9736955.p?id=1218164036446&skuId=9736955
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Asus+-+...lack/9556125.p?id=1218124208054&skuId=9556125
I would opt for the first , the second is rather large. As far as GPU's, they are basically the same except the first link with the GTX 360m has higher clock speeds compared to the larger notebooks GTX 260m.
- Joined
- Apr 5, 2009
- Messages
- 57
I love my ASUS laptop. It's critical to game capability to get a non-integrated video card.
- Joined
- Oct 17, 2008
- Messages
- 2,760
canirunit.com
You can pretty much play most source games, albeit with extremely low settings, on your macbook.
I had Win Vista installed through Bootcamp on my Macbook (along side OSX) and it worked pretty well for almost everything I could throw at it. (Again, on lowest settings, but they're playable)
If you get a Macbook with the dedicated graphics chip you'll be more than good to go for bootcamping windows, and when steam/valve starts to release more source games for OSX.
Enjoy your Mac, I love mine!
I had Win Vista installed through Bootcamp on my Macbook (along side OSX) and it worked pretty well for almost everything I could throw at it. (Again, on lowest settings, but they're playable)
If you get a Macbook with the dedicated graphics chip you'll be more than good to go for bootcamping windows, and when steam/valve starts to release more source games for OSX.
Enjoy your Mac, I love mine!
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2009
- Messages
- 945
To put this in perspective, the 9400M graphics processor is being used in netbooks.
Also the Intel Core 2 Duo is a pretty old processor, but not bad none the less. I bought my Dell laptop about 4 years ago (if I remember correctly) for $1400 and it came with the same processor and the Radeon Mobility X1400 GPU and 2GB of RAM.
If you're looking for gaming, you're going to have to get a Windows box. There just aren't many developers out there making games for Macs.
If you're looking for something small that will play any game you want, take a look at the M11x from Alienware.
http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/alienware-m11x?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&~ck=mn
Or if you're looking for something that will blow your opponents out of the water and make them cry (plus it just looks cool and I'd feel like a BA pulling this out of my bag.), then I'd go with something like this:
http://www.dell.com/us/en/home/note...&~oid=us~en~29~laptop-alienware-m17x_anav_1~~
Last edited:
It can, and it will. Just don't expect it look to very pretty.
What games do you play right now? I'm not sure what steam games can run on a mac as of right now, but I know that DoD:S could not run on my buddies mac, but thankfully his dead in the tech department of a local police station so he dual boots win-xp and mac.
Well, you don't need to be an IT genius to dual boot windows and mac as apple makes it really easy to set up with boot camp. You'll be able to run most source games on low to medium settings while running windows. You also could use emulators like cross over games however then games will obviously work better in native windows. However Valve said all source games would be out on the mac osx platform, and that they will release a bank of games for mac every Wednesday. Which means mac will be a native platform and will work just as well as if they were on a comparable windows system.
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2009
- Messages
- 805
ASUS Laptop FTW!!!! I have one that i can switch back and forth between integrated and dedicated. Integrated for battery saving and Dedicated for gaming. Only problem i have with source games is TF2 drops framerate a bit when i get into an area where alot of particles are flying and whatnot, but other than that i can play all my games next to no problems.
You can dual boot your Macbook with Windows, but if you play a few source games and some Guild Wars, is it really worth the hassle?
Steam will run natively on Mac OSX now, so you can just wait for them to get stuff like DOD:S moved over. I know Altitude is supported as of now, as well as several other games.
But honestly, if you see yourself playing lots of games, don't buy a Mac, or if you must have one, take your desktop to college. I have a MacBook Pro and I don't ever use it to run games, just notes and a few videos here and there, and I mainly just game on my desktop.
BTW, Apple doesn't know what thermal grease/paste is, so if you start overheating a bunch, you may have to crack the thing open and reapply. Apple uses 3g of thermal paste per heatsink contact area (it has 3) and basically just suffocates your cpu and gpu.
Steam will run natively on Mac OSX now, so you can just wait for them to get stuff like DOD:S moved over. I know Altitude is supported as of now, as well as several other games.
But honestly, if you see yourself playing lots of games, don't buy a Mac, or if you must have one, take your desktop to college. I have a MacBook Pro and I don't ever use it to run games, just notes and a few videos here and there, and I mainly just game on my desktop.
BTW, Apple doesn't know what thermal grease/paste is, so if you start overheating a bunch, you may have to crack the thing open and reapply. Apple uses 3g of thermal paste per heatsink contact area (it has 3) and basically just suffocates your cpu and gpu.
