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Mac or PC? Gaming wise?

Koonie

Koonie

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 18, 2009
12
0
I'm still contemplating between a mac laptop and a pc laptop. I know the Mac laptops are way more expensive than the PC laptops. Right now I'm looking at the best 15 inch macbook pro, but I found an HP that's half the price and has twice as better specs than the mac.

I just want to get an idea on why lots of people think mac is better than PC. This purchase is very important to me.

Also, how well does gaming work on the mac laptops? How well would it work in the higher end 15 inch mac laptop? I'm talking about games like Call of Duty 4, etc. I have had PC all my life, and I notice that it starts to get slower and slower, even with antivirus. Please advise.
 
People buy Mac's because of the way they look, they way that they are built, battery-life features and the OS. If you are going to game, you want to stick with a PC.
 
If you are interested in heavy gaming, get the PC. Most games aren't released for OSX, and those that are released are generally poor ports that don't run as well as they do under windows.
 
Koonie said:
I'm still contemplating between a mac laptop and a pc laptop. I know the Mac laptops are way more expensive than the PC laptops. Right now I'm looking at the best 15 inch macbook pro, but I found an HP that's half the price and has twice as better specs than the mac.

I just want to get an idea on why lots of people think mac is better than PC. This purchase is very important to me.

Also, how well does gaming work on the mac laptops? How well would it work in the higher end 15 inch mac laptop? I'm talking about games like Call of Duty 4, etc. I have had PC all my life, and I notice that it starts to get slower and slower, even with antivirus. Please advise.
Click to expand...

If its just cod games get macbook pro, itll easily max it out
 
If gaming is your main purpose the only reason I could see getting the MBP would be to have something that will do well at gaming yet be thin and light with great battery life.

For sheer gaming performance the ASUS G Series G51Vx-X3A and ASUS G Series G51J-A1 both offer Geforce GTX260M GPU's with 1GB VRAM. The latter also sports dual 7200RPM 320GB HD's (which one should set in RAID 0:cool:) and a Core i7 at 1.6Ghz. Though they are quite a bit bulkier and heavier than a Macbook Pro and likely have poor battery life.

Personally I would opt for a base Macbook for portable computing with some light gaming and to build a gaming desktop. Unless your reason for this is LAN parties.
 
Koonie said:
I'm still contemplating between a mac laptop and a pc laptop. I know the Mac laptops are way more expensive than the PC laptops. Right now I'm looking at the best 15 inch macbook pro, but I found an HP that's half the price and has twice as better specs than the mac.

I just want to get an idea on why lots of people think mac is better than PC. This purchase is very important to me.

Also, how well does gaming work on the mac laptops? How well would it work in the higher end 15 inch mac laptop? I'm talking about games like Call of Duty 4, etc. I have had PC all my life, and I notice that it starts to get slower and slower, even with antivirus. Please advise.
Click to expand...

Why not go with the best of both worlds? Instead of buying the top end 15" MacBook Pro at $2299, why not get a MacBook at $999 or an entry level 13" macBook Pro at $1199 and spend the $1300/$1100 on a gaming desktop PC.

If you don't want to build a gaming machine yourself, for $879 you can get a Dell Studio XPS 8000 with a Core i5 2.66GHz CPU and 3GB RAM. Just install a Radeon 5850 yourself (or a 5870 if you can stretch to it) and there you go.

Gaming on laptops is very expensive and gives sub par performance. Graphics chips in laptops tend to be clocked down versions of the previous generation GPUs.
 
velocityg4 said:
If gaming is your main purpose the only reason I could see getting the MBP would be to have something that will do well at gaming yet be thin and light with great battery life.

For sheer gaming performance the ASUS G Series G51Vx-X3A and ASUS G Series G51J-A1 both offer Geforce GTX260M GPU's with 1GB VRAM. The latter also sports dual 7200RPM 320GB HD's (which one should set in RAID 0:cool:) and a Core i7 at 1.6Ghz. Though they are quite a bit bulkier and heavier than a Macbook Pro and likely have poor battery life.

Personally I would opt for a base Macbook for portable computing with some light gaming and to build a gaming desktop. Unless your reason for this is LAN parties.
Click to expand...



Gaming is not my main priority, it's just one of my priorities. I have seen with the HPs in the past that they generally slow down after a short while, even with antivirus. I don't know if that's the same with macs?

How would boot camp work? If I made a partition for windows 7, would that still use the same specs from the mac itself?
 
Koonie said:
Gaming is not my main priority, it's just one of my priorities. I have seen with the HPs in the past that they generally slow down after a short while, even with antivirus. I don't know if that's the same with macs?

How would boot camp work? If I made a partition for windows 7, would that still use the same specs from the mac itself?
Click to expand...

Maybe you should do some research, you could easily find the answers to your questions on google. Go on the switching to mac page on the Apple website for a basic overview.

Windows PCs slow down because the vast majority of users don't know how to look after them. You need do defrag monthly and reinstall windows yearly to keep it responsive. Antivirus uses up system resources so any modest speed advantage a windows laptop might have is used up by that. Macs don't slow down in the same way over time. My 3 year old macbook feels as fast as it was when I got it.
 
I was in the same boat as you and decided to go the Mac route. I picked up 15" uMBP today with the 9600M GT 256mb for $1699 + tax from the Apple Refurb store. After doing some research i found this gave me the best of both worlds, all the Mac glitz & glamor and the gaming power needed to play the games I wanted to. Sure you are paying a little more for the Mac, but the benefits like greatly battery life, lighter overall weight (those gaming laptops are HEAVY) make it worth it IMO.
 
It's not an easy decision. I'm planning on getting a new machine in the coming months but I'm torn between a new iMac and a desktop PC, and it will primarily be used for gaming.

Macs, at least the 2 I currently own, are very quiet machines. Even during L4D with my graphics card overclocked on the iMac it's still very quiet. When I play games on the family's newest desktop it's all very purdy, but also loud and the Windows experience just isn't as good as the older iMac.

So ones quieter, better built, etc.
The others upgradeable, more powerful. :eek:

But if you go the mac route be sure to use Bootcamp! VMware and the rest are terrible for gaming.
 
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