Laptop question, advice please

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I've never been into PC gaming but right now I may be interested. I own a MacBook (10.4.11) but most games go on Windows and also Steam works only with Win. So, my question is: do you think it's better adjusting my Mac to run Win (how ? does it work well ?) or buying another Win laptop ? Thanks

If it's an intel proc (should be, but it's been a while...) then you ought to be able to run Win as natively as possible, using something like bootcamp. I know Orwell has some sort of windows on his lappy.

^ don't even mention "Orwell" and "Windows" in the same sentence, or he'll start to twtich into epileptic seizures and spit froth while rolling on the floor.
That much he hates Windows.


if your Mac is new enough (¿which model/ram/processor?) with bootcamp you won't need another laptop. If you're stuck on an old model I'd suggest that you get a new Mac laptop, not a Win one.
BTW there're Parallels and Crossover, which lets you use Windows games (or any app) right on the Mac desktop.

10.4.11 is your OS version, not your laptop version. Without hardware specs, we can't tell whether or not you can game on it. If you go to ->About this Mac you can see what your processor is and how much RAM you have. I'm guessing, if it's still running Tiger, that it's not a very high-end system, but if you have an Intel processor (which you should, since you said it was a MacBook) you can still install Windows XP and it should run fine. I don't think Tiger has Boot Camp though, so you'll have some difficulty. Unless you paid through the nose for a high-end Macbook Pro, you probably have a crappy integrated graphics card which won't like gaming very well. I second Computerlove's recommendation- if you get a new laptop, get one of the new Macbook Pros (they're cheaper than they used to be) and use BootCamp to install Windows 7 on it. If you're a college student, you can get the server version of Windows 7 free through Dreamspark, and the server version is basically just a less bloated version of the desktop OS anyways.

There are a number of decent free Mac games I should mention- OpenArena, Glest, Warzone 2100, Savage 2, Tremulous, Urban Terror, and a few others. Most of those are cross-platform, they'll turn up if you search Google for good Linux games.

That much I hate Vista. XP can be made into a mostly-usable OS with some effort, and I have plans to give Win7 a shot as soon as my uni gives me my free copy. Of course, it will only be for gaming- you need a UNIX-based OS to do any serious work.



But they're not so good for gaming, and I wouldn't expect Parallels to run well at all on an older laptop. You probably need a couple gigs of RAM if you want to run multiple OS's simultaneously.

That depends on how important gaming is to you and what kind of experience you want from the games. At the same price, mac will always have inferior hardware to a pure PC and Windows games will always run slower. You'll also need to buy a copy of Windows for the mac too, so in the end you may get something like half the fps you'll get for a PC of the same price. The only extra you get from the mac is the ability to run OSX. You'll have to decide for yourself whether that's worth the premium. Ah, mac also have very limited choice of GPUs. That 9400M on the mac book pro is underwhelming.

1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo

1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

Should run most of the Mac games I listed just fine- plus, those are all free, which is nice. If there are Windows-only games you want, you'll have to upgrade your system. Tiger doesn't support Boot Camp, so you'd have to buy Snow Leopard in order to dual boot with Windows.

What graphics card do you have? (About this Mac->More info->Graphics/Display) Mine's a GMA3100x and it doesn't like to let me play 3d games.

GMA 950

So your system is fairly similar to mine. Again, all the games I listed run fine, you might want to give them a try. The upgrade to Snow Leopard is only $29, and that would include Boot Camp so you could easily install Windows XP alongside OS X (it almost does it for you). You wouldn't be running the latest hard-core games on such a setup, but you'd get a taste of what's there. I'd try that out before spending the cash on a brand new system.

The best gaming machines have ATI or nVidia graphics cards in them.

The better nVidia graphics are 8600GT 8800GT/X, 9600GT 9800GT, 250, 260,285,295, etc. If it has GT, it's good. But GS and GSO are just rebranded older models of the same line. 9600GSO = 8600GSO.

I'm not up to speed with ATI though

GMA950 is not good for gaming. It's not just speed, which is a serious problem by itself, the vertex shader and TnL is emulated by the driver using the CPU and the job is done very poorly. A lot of games have different level of artifacts because of this. And the pixel shader is 2.x only, which excludes most modern games. If there's any particular game that you are interested in, I'll recommend you to check if GMA950 is supported first. You may also want to google the name of the game with GMA950 to see if there's any common issues.

On the desktop side, I won't recommended NVIDIA at this time. The 8xxx/9xxx/1xx/21x/22x/24x/25x/31x series are all based on G80/90 which is old tech. Only GTX's are true GT200 (code name of the chip), but even those are 1 generation behind AMD now. Their new generation called Fermi may bring back parity, but they aren't expected to be available until next March. The current generation of AMD is called Evergreen. Currently it ranges from 5750 (~$150) to 5970 (~$650). There'll also be cheaper 56xx early next year.

On the laptop side, things go a lot slower. All the NVIDIA 2xxM GPU are G90 based. AMD uses the same naming scheme for their mobile parts but they only have 4xxx series now. Mobility Radeon HD 5xxx are supposed to be released next quarter but you'll likely have to wait a bit longer before seeing notebooks using them.

Put windows on mac . Use windows xp ($30xp or pay $100-300vista-7).

I got my new windows laptop for $500 (dell inspriron 14) well it was a gift.

A new windows came out it is called windows 7
.

Ok, I found an offer that seems interesting, please give me your opinion on this:

Intel Pentium Dual-Core T4300 (2100 Mhz, 1 MB L2 Cache, 800 Mhz FSB), RAM 4096 MB, 500 GB HD, Video NVIDIA GeForce G150M from 512 mb to 1791 mb (Packard Bell).

Will it allow me to play a decent percentage of games ?

The Pentium is a pretty outdated processor. If you're buying a new computer, you should probably get at least a Core 2 Duo.

The other specs seem good.

Despite the Pentium name, T4300 is a Core 2 (Penryn) with just 1MB of L2 cache enabled.

G150M is a mainstream GPU. You will be able to play most game but to get playable framerate with more recent games, you'll have to lower the quality settings.

Hmmm...

Thats a tough one. Actually desktops or tower servers make far better gaming rigs then laptops. Laptops can actually overheat easily when the graphics get going. I just would not build a serious gaming rig out of a laptop. Besides you will spend a lot of money on a gaming laptop versus the performance you end up with.

There are many good gaming machines out there at Best Buy. I have a better build.

Go to Dell.com and look at their servers. Get a tower server for small business with a Xeon processor, 4 to 8 gigs of RAM and a floppy disc drive for older apps. (Trust me, sometimes you still need a floppy) Delete the DVD drive unless it also has a burner and lightscribe. Sony's DVD burners are reliable and can be made region free more easily then most if you desire.

Obviously if you build it yourself, going to tiger direct and buying 7 Ultimate 64 bit edition is a no brainer.

After that, to to newegg and get a decent sound and graphics card. All of the gaming performance is in the sound and graphics cards. Get the best you can afford.

Use a PCI-express graphics card, not an AGP card.

A gaming machine only needs a middle weight CPU. Any dual core 64 bit processor will do. Xeon or Opteron processors are the best.

For hard drives, RAID is only necessary to protect your data. Any SATA-II drive will be fine. If you use RAID, just do mirroring or RAID 10. With a good backup plan, you don't need RAID. In gaming, performance is in graphics and sound. A middle performance hard drive is fine (10k rpm or 7500 rpm speed). Just make sure there is enough storage to meet your needs.

You do NOT need a SCSI drive for gaming.

Carefully add up the cost of building a server into a gaming system versus getting one of those alienware or falcon monster machines. Trust me, you can save a lot of money building a tower server into a gaming machine.

Don't forget to get a good monitor, comfortable chair and decent speakers.