Computer Advice

[0makol16]

Hello, I need some advice. I’m starting my last semester in high school and will be going to college soon. I play games pretty often but with school and soon college I won’t be playing as often as I do now. The two computers I own are listed in my sig and when I move out I will be only taking my laptop with me and also my Xbox 360 which I will may sell for money since I don’t use it very often. My desktop has bootcamp on it so I can play PC games with friends, and I don’t know if I should upgrade my laptop’s harddrive and install bootcamp or build a custom PC that I will use for gaming in my free time. The list below shows the games I mostly play now.

Company of Heroes: Opposing Forces (PC)
Command and Conquer 3 w/ Kane’s Wrath (PC)
Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth 2 (PC)
Counter Strike: Source (PC)
Team Fortress 2 (PC)
Warcraft 3 w/ Frozen Throne (Mac/PC)
World of Warcraft and both expansions (Mac/PC)
Spore (Mac/PC)
Battlefield 2142 (Mac)
Rise of Nations (Mac)

Any advice will be greatly appreciated and thanks in advance.

[MagicWok]

http://guides.macrumors.com/Which_Ap...arison_-_Power

Mac's aren't machines made for gaming. That doesn't mean it can't do it adequately though.

If you must keep using a Mac for whatever reason, your only course of action is a MBP, and preferably the 15" MBP. It has a lower native res which will help with speed and performs with similar gusto to the 17". You'll also need to bootcamp your machine to take advantage of the speed for playing games in an XP/Vista environment where you can use both gpus.

With Snow Leopard coming soon - it should help so you can use both cards simeoultaneously, though if the software will benefit, that's another question.

I would personally thinking about getting a windows-based laptop if you mainly want to play games and do work...

[SnowLeopard2008]

Keep one laptop. Sell the stuff and get a 15" MBP. Having two computers is rough as it is, and college will add more work than high school. The issue of keeping data in sync between the two computers is another problem.

[tbae12]

If you really want to enjoy your gaming experience you should keep your macbook and buy a custom gaming pc. Macbooks are not very good computers to play games on even with the upgraded graphics card. If you have the money then get the pc and leave your macbook to less graphic intensive stuff like school work and the like.

[0makol16]

I have to decided to sell my xbox and xbox games for some moeny to go towards the custom PC and keep the laptop for school uses and probably bootcamp it with a bigger harddrive if there are lan parties . Thanks for the advice, it was helpful. If anyone still wants to give more advice/warnings that would be great since I still have 1 more semester to make a final decision.

[kastenbrust]

Originally Posted by tbae12

If you really want to enjoy your gaming experience you should keep your macbook and buy a custom gaming pc. Macbooks are not very good computers to play games on even with the upgraded graphics card. If you have the money then get the pc and leave your macbook to less graphic intensive stuff like school work and the like.

Either build your own gaming pc, or get a Macbook Pro with dual graphics cards, but to make it worth while you'd need the higher end Macbook Pro with the 512 graphics cards and thats really expensive, you'd save a lot just building your own PC and you could have insane specs for the same price.