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How To Fry An Egg With An M2 MBA

G

getmac

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 30, 2022
32
70
Last week I picked up a new M2 MBA 16/512 Starlight. It has been doing great. I returned a base M1 with only 8GB that I was having a lot of issues with spinning beach balls and associated slowdowns. Everything has been running super smooth until I played Civ4 via Porting Kit in a Wineskin Wrapper. It is cool that I am able to get a game released for Windows in 2005 to work on a different OS using completely different architecture. With that said ... holy cow it got hot quick. I have been using my new MBA almost exclusively on my lap on the couch. No heat issues up to this point.

Running a game through windows emulation might be the fastest way to heat one of these bad boys up. Forget exporting 4K or 3D rendering. Play Civ4 for 30 minutes and you'll be able to make bacon and eggs. Now if I could only get Civ3 to play. It won't even start up. Boo.
 
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getmac said:
Last week I picked up a new M2 MBA 16/512 Starlight. It has been doing great. I returned a base M1 with only 8GB that I was having a lot of issues with spinning beach balls and associated slowdowns. Everything has been running super smooth until I played Civ4 via Porting Kit in a Wineskin Wrapper. It is cool that I am able to get a game released for Windows in 2005 to work on a different OS using completely different architecture. With that said ... holy cow it got hot quick. I have been using my new MBA almost exclusively on my lap on the couch. No heat issues up to this point.

Running a game through windows emulation might be the fastest way to heat one of these bad boys up. Forget exporting 4K or 3D rendering. Play Civ4 for 30 minutes and you'll be able to make bacon and eggs. Now if I could only get Civ3 to play. It won't even start up. Boo.
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Macs aren’t great for gaming, particularly running 32-bit x86 games through WINE that rely on graphics platforms that Apple has long since deprecated. That said, you might try running Windows 11 ARM in a Parallels 18 VM to see if Microsoft’s emulation layer works better.
 
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getmac said:
Last week I picked up a new M2 MBA 16/512 Starlight. It has been doing great. I returned a base M1 with only 8GB that I was having a lot of issues with spinning beach balls and associated slowdowns. Everything has been running super smooth until I played Civ4 via Porting Kit in a Wineskin Wrapper. It is cool that I am able to get a game released for Windows in 2005 to work on a different OS using completely different architecture. With that said ... holy cow it got hot quick. I have been using my new MBA almost exclusively on my lap on the couch. No heat issues up to this point.

Running a game through windows emulation might be the fastest way to heat one of these bad boys up. Forget exporting 4K or 3D rendering. Play Civ4 for 30 minutes and you'll be able to make bacon and eggs. Now if I could only get Civ3 to play. It won't even start up. Boo.
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Best to keep it off your lap then!
😁
 
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Grats on the new MBA! They're nice little machines. You'll probably want something with active cooling if you're planning on any serious long-term gaming time, though.

sjperformance said:
Since when has a Mac been considered a gaming device....
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Since 2009 for me, when I got my first MacBook Pro.

Switched exclusively to Mac at home five years ago and haven't regretted it one bit, while continuing to play games. I even bought the M2 MBA (10/24/1) almost entirely so I could play games while traveling for work, and it's been doing great so far. I don't push its limits with unported games, just ones that ran natively on intel Macs and now require Rosetta for Apple Silicon. It's gotten just a little warm to the touch, but definitely not scalding. Even after an hour of playing on mid-high settings.
 
I didn't buy for gaming as I mostly game on consoles, but I do enjoy retro gaming, especially old strategy games and CRPGs. I definitely didn't expect it to get so hot running a 20 year old game even if it is emulating x86 hardware and windows software.

Mostly I was thinking all of the reviewers testing the thermals by rendering video might want to switch to playing an old Civ game via Wine instead and really get there thermal benchmarks smoking. Great computer overall, just damn it got hotter than expected in one non-traditional niche use.
 
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People keep bashing these machines for people that play games on them but i just dont see why. The Air outperforms other ultra books in many games and does so quietly. I’ve tried them all as i want a lightweight small laptop for my daily use and occasional games. I usually play paradox strategy games which can peg the cpu and on say windows laptops I’ve tried (Dell XPS plus, Surface laptop 4, pro 8, G14, G15, Alienware x14 …. Many more) the games i play create a ton of fan noise and kill the battery within 1-2 hours. With Air M2 i get performance that is as high as the g14 cpu wise (if not as consistent because translation layer) and no noise, top this off with being able to play the games at the highest in game speed setting for 4-5 hours and you have a machine that just cant be beat by a current windows machine when certain factors are taken into consideration. I will say however the Razerblade 14 (new one with 6900hx) was one of the best machines (my opinion) for windows as it is the quietest when running the games i play And i value that quiet. The only issue with the Razerblade 14 is the aspect ratio, screen quality and other small annoying issues on windows.
 
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getmac said:
Last week I picked up a new M2 MBA 16/512 Starlight. It has been doing great. I returned a base M1 with only 8GB that I was having a lot of issues with spinning beach balls and associated slowdowns. Everything has been running super smooth until I played Civ4 via Porting Kit in a Wineskin Wrapper. It is cool that I am able to get a game released for Windows in 2005 to work on a different OS using completely different architecture. With that said ... holy cow it got hot quick. I have been using my new MBA almost exclusively on my lap on the couch. No heat issues up to this point.

Running a game through windows emulation might be the fastest way to heat one of these bad boys up. Forget exporting 4K or 3D rendering. Play Civ4 for 30 minutes and you'll be able to make bacon and eggs. Now if I could only get Civ3 to play. It won't even start up. Boo.
Click to expand...

Yeah, these M2 MBA get so hot, on some games it runs even slower than the M1 MBA (Shadow of the Tomb Raider on high settings).

Not sure why everybody brings up 4K video editing, as the media encoders are doing most of the work so it won’t be pushing the thermals.
 
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Zest28 said:
Yeah, these M2 MBA get so hot, on some games it runs even slower than the M1 MBA (Shadow of the Tomb Raider on high settings).

Not sure why everybody brings up 4K video editing, as the media encoders are doing most of the work so it won’t be pushing the thermals.
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And yet on the games i play it runs much faster than the m1 and in fact it can nearly match speeds of an alder lake i5 desktop i have at times. By speeds i mean in game time montly ticks.
 
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Mcdevidr said:
And yet on the games i play it runs much faster than the m1 and in fact it can nearly match speeds of an alder lake i5 desktop i have at times. By speeds i mean in game time montly ticks.
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It depends on what settings. On medium settings the M2 MBA was still faster in Shadow of the Tomb Raiders, but as soon as you hit high settings, the M1 MBA became faster.

So on the M2 MBA, you have to lower the settings in order to not stress the GPU too much for it to outperform the M1 MBA. That is basically to trick to gaming on the M2 MBA, don’t run nice graphics.
 
Zest28 said:
It depends on what settings. On medium settings the M2 MBA was still faster in Shadow of the Tomb Raiders, but as soon as you hit high settings, the M1 MBA became faster.

So on the M2 MBA, you have to lower the settings in order to not stress the GPU too much for it to outperform the M1 MBA. That is basically to trick to gaming on the M2 MBA, don’t run nice graphics.
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I've seen a few benchmarks showing that the 8-core M2 can be faster than the 10-core M2 when playing games for sustained periods. I'm pretty sure this is something that could be "fixed" within software to let the 10-core know not to run so fast that it has to throttle as much. However I guess it would probably require game specific patches which given MacOS game support and Rosetta x86 emulation probably wont happen for many games unfortunately.
 
Yea i mean its whatever. On notebookcheck the 10 core seems to be able to perform at about the level of a 1050 mobile in actual games which for a fanless machine im quite happy with it. If i need sustained performance ill just put it under one of my quiet noctua fans.
 
I managed to get Civ3 up and running via Porting Kit today. It ran warm, nowhere near as hot as Civ4. Definitely drains the battery (6-8 hours), but way better than my 2017 MacBook Pro. I'd be interested to see how a 4X game that is native runs compared to a 20 year old windows games needing to run under emulation. Would modern 3D graphics tax the machine more or less since it would be running native. Hmmm.
 
All paradox titles run on Mac OS. Not native. As does civ 6 and humankind. The paradox games play well. I have ran into some crashes on 8gb ram models not on 16. But no other machine will run these game for 5 hours on battery at the highest speeds so im quite happy with the performance in the games I play.
 
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A game usually puts both the GPU and CPU under constant pressure so it's one of the greatest stress-tests you could find. I recommend running with a framerate-limiter or even Vsync on so that the chip can get some occasional breathing room, which will translate to smoother gameplay overall.

A passively cooled laptop is of course never going to be optimal for this task but so far WoW has been running satisfyingly enough for me to dare running it when doing challenging content.
 
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Quick, someone photoshop George Foreman with a M2 MBA instead of his signature grill...
 
These threads always perplex me ... would someone complain about a screwdriver because it can't pound in a nail?

I am going to find a screwdriver forum and report back here.

Maybe I just continually fall for click-bait. :p

"A good craftsman never blames his tools". Or something like that. Someone said.
 
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My M1 Air starts to heat up and run out of RAM when playing four 4K HDR YouTube videos and running slowhotcomputer.com simultaneously.
 
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eicca said:
My M1 Air starts to heat up and run out of RAM when playing four 4K HDR YouTube videos and running slowhotcomputer.com simultaneously.
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HA it's a real site. Awesome!

Edit: Aww. As soon as the tab is no longer in front, it stops heating up my M2 MBA.
 
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