Running Bootcamp- Best way to go about it?

[ErikB718]

Hey all, first time poster, long time lurker.

I'm typing this on my new 15" MBP i7, 16GB, Vega 20, 512 gb ssd. I love it, a huge upgrade over my original 2011 MBP.

While I use OSX mainly for video and photo editing, I also have a little gaming addiction, and wanted to install a bootcamp.

I opted for the Vega 20 and getting apple care over a 1 TB drive, and with a small internal ssd, I was wondering if I should try and install bootcamp on an external 500 GB usb3 drive and boot from that for my gaming needs utilizing this method: https://9to5mac.com/2017/08/31/how-windows-10-mac-boot-camp-external-drive-video/

But there are cons to this method as well, mainly that I'll probably eff it up and somehow destroy everything.

Or should I just install a small bootcamp partition - Say 60 GB (ish?), and run steam and any games off of an external drive.

Or am I just an idiot for wanting to run games at all, and I should just stick to being a media hack?

 

[leman]

I used to have a Windows To Go disk but it was a real pain to create and to maintain, and it also had a habit to become corrupted after system updates (which are very difficult to avoid with Windows nowadays). So I completely gave up on it.

Running your game library from an external SSD is the method I'd recommend. You don't even need 60Gb for the Bootcamp partition, 30Gb should be sufficient.

As to "am I an idiot for wanting to run games at all" — the MBP with Vega is a more than capable gaming platform and it certainly makes more sense to use it rather than buying a dedicated gaming machine (unless you are a hardcore gamer and have very high demands on quality and performance).

 

[ErikB718]

Yeah, my dreams of being a hardcore gamer died around the arrival of child 2, sooo, good point.

 

[leman]

Yeah, my dreams of being a hardcore gamer died around the arrival of child 2, sooo, good point.

At least you can still find time to play games — it could be worse