Help from 11" MBA owners! I'm debating selling my MBP and switching to MBA 11"

[mgartner0622]

Hello all-

I currently have a 13" MBP that's usually docked at home or travels with me to school for notes and projects. It's the previous generation 2.53GHz 13" Model with 250GB HDD and 4GB RAM, as well as the 9400M graphics.

I'm debating selling my MBP and getting a CTO Air 11" 128GB W/ 1.6GHz & 4GB of RAM.

I'm wondering as follows:
I do occasional light gaming on steam. Is the MBA Graphics card underclocked?
If so is it worse than my 9400M?
I also dock to a 1920x1200 23" Apple Cinema Display. Would the MBA with the 320M be able to pump out more power than my current pro when running the cinema display (Via DVI<Minidisplayport)
Can the air withstand basically never being turned off like my MBP or is there overheating danger? (Running for ~14 hours a day and asleep the rest)


I could live with the hard drive (or rather SSD), so that's not an issue, but i'm wanting to upgrade, and am considering whether a base 15" Pro, or a 11" MBA would suffice.
Basically, I'm trying to get the best of both worlds, and this 13" is not really cutting it for me.

Thank you very much.

 

[diablo2112]

IMHO, the new MBA will have better graphics performance, so the answers to your questions are generally yes, the MBA will do light gaming and drive external displays just fine. The few benchmarks I've seen show the nVidia 320M is speedy in the MBA, and benchmarks roughly 3 times faster than the integrated video on the i3 chips (which also explains why Apple choose the Core2Duo and the discrete 320M over the integrated i3 solution). Kudos to Apple. In today's computing environment, the graphics chip is arguably even more important to performance than the processor.