recommend gaming mac
 

hi guys is there any mac just for gaming that you guys whould recommend if i was to go for the mac mini which one should i go for the 599.00 one or the 799.00 one i need a good opinion this mac will be just for gaming

mac mini is terrible for gaming, it uses onboard graphics I think its 64mb, really the only options you have are the mac book pro with the 8600gt the imacs with 256mb video memory or any mac pro config

Totally agree with the MBP recommendation. Honestly, I think it might be an even better option than the Mac Pro, because none of the Mac Pro's cards are really for gaming. So, yeah, I'd say MBP.

Yeah macs lack gaming rig models, though a Mac Pro would be a ripper system for gaming. I have seen a Mac Pro desktop run BF2 at full settings out of the box and it ran very smooth.

Also, nice sig line....Gill Scott Heron. Though I do think that the Mac revolution will be televised. Look at their commercials.

should i go with this guy or this guy

should i go with this guy oh and what is BF2

BF2 = Battlefield 2

Both Battlefield 2 and Call of Duty 2 are real tests for graphic cards. I was able to play Call of Duty 2 using Boot Camp on the first Intel iMac quite smoothly. Even my PC gaming friends were impressed.

but which one of those guys should i belive mac pro or macbook pro

depends, do you want a laptop for gaming or a desktop. My personal preference is to game on a desktop.

what the hell this is a mac forum not xbox loser forum

desktop preferably

woah dude calm down, he's just giving a logical solution, really the only thing xbox and ps3's wont have that pc's are getting is crysis. If you have the cash get a mac pro, If the 4 256mb cards run in sli they'd work great for gaming, And im not sure but the nvidia quadro http://www.cooltechzone.com/Departme..._200601302176/ is ok for gaming. If your going to play on windows which I'll assume, you can buy a 8800 and use it for windows, but then you'll have to swap graphics cards to boot into osx. But seriously if you want serious gaming you can either wait until cards like the 8800 work in macs, or much more easily, by a console or make a gaming rif

what games whould work well on a black macbook preferbly fps

most of them, but not very well....

what about call of duty 1 and 2

yeah on the new ones, but if your going mobile get a mbp

If you take a look at the breakdown of the cards, the MBP is the best way to go. That 8600 is the only gaming card in a Mac.

Why does this matter? Because it means the cards have specific functions on them to make games run faster. Basically, the card will do it at the hardware level rather than making the OS do it at the software level. The difference is huge. I've seen Mac Pro's brought to their knees by games that are 3 years old because their graphics cards could not call the correct functions.

So I reiterate. If you want a computer for hardcore gaming, get the MBP 15" with the 8600 in it. The only way a Mac Pro would be able to overcome the bad card (including the Quadro, which is not for gaming) is if you bought upwards of 4Gb's of RAM. Besides which, a Mac Pro + Ram + a monitor = 3,797.00 before tax. Get the MBP, for 2000 or so. It's cheaper, it's more mobile, and it's better for what you want to do.

there are a few DX10 games coming out in 2008 that are must have for me, so I am just going to build a new PC rig for it. Starcraft 2 and Fallout 3 are two games that I have to play because I loved the previous games so much.

That's good point as well. If you go with kind of a bare bones gaming rig, and a MB together, it might cost the same as a MBP, and be better for gaming anyway.

Out of interest are you going to have an 8800 in your rig? And please tell me your going to get Crysis, the first true dx10 game.

But yeah the mbp is the only "gaming" mac, but im sure that will change....I hope. But if you think about it the 256mb card is getting out of date. Bioshock recommends a 512mb card, and the next range of pc games are all going to recommend at least the 8800.

mbp= macbook pro right

what the hell happened to the rest of the thread

what is dx10

dude calm down its on the first page of the thread, dx 10 is direct x 10, it is only in vista is makes games look a hell of a lot better, there are a few cards that do this, none do it better than the nvidia 8800gtx which is the the best gaming card on the market. Here watch a comparison between dx9 (xp) and dx 10 http://www.computerandvideogames.com....php?id=165546 scroll down a bit and there are 2 vids, you can see that the detail is a hell of a lot better than dx9

This looks like the right place to ask this.

I have an aging Mac that I play World of Warcraft on (Burning Crusade expansion). Here are the computer's specs:

tower (the wind tunnel model?)
OS 10.3.9
dual 1.42 GHz G4 processors, 2 MB L3 cache per processor
2 GB DDR SDRAM
bus speed: 167 MHz
120 GB hard drive, 22 GB free

graphics card is nVidia GeForce4 Ti 4600, 128 MB RAM

I absolutely love this game, but it's nearly unbearable in the higher level instances. While some people are getting 15-20 fps, I'm getting 2. I've actually seen 0.7 fps in Karazhan.

I've done almost all I can think of: killed all non-essential applications including daemons etc, deleted all WoW files and reinstalled from scratch, disabled game addons, and I've seen no framerate gains whatsoever. The only thing I haven't tried is to wipe the hard drive and reinstall the OS as well. I figure it's been more than 2 years and there have been a few crashes in that time (mostly from power outages taking it down while in sleep mode).

My first question is, is there anything at all I can try to improve my performance on this machine? Except for WoW, this aging computer runs circles around new Windows computers I've used at work, and it should keep going for a long time. Any ideas what is causing it to perform so poorly? A friend suggested the processors are too slow; another friend thought the system bus might be the bottleneck.

My second question is, if I have to buy a new computer to get the performance I'm looking for (I'd be happy with 15-20 fps in the intense areas, 30 fps would be awesome), what would a good configuration be? Cost-wise, would my cheapest alternative be to buy a new Mac or to assemble a Windows (blech) computer dedicated to just gaming?

WoW's Mac system requirements are:
OS 10.3.9, 933 MHz G4/G5 processor, 512 MB RAM (1 GB rec), NVIDIA or ATI GPU with 32 MB VRAM (64 MB VRAM recommended), 10 GB HD space

Thanks!

I would say: yes and no, based on having read some reviews at www.barefeats.com. According to BF, the previous generation iMac C2D 2.33GHz with GeForce 7600 GT is truly a screaming game Mac. The (current) aluminum iMacs seem to be holding their own against the MBP 15". This is real world performance, and they are testing only for a small selection of games, so it's possible that the MBP will have much greater longevity for playing as yet unreleased games (such as Starcraft 2 and Unreal Tournament 3).

well we can always hope that we get some form of gaming mac at mac world....
But if you have the cash, and you want some hardcore gaming, you can either get a new mac pro with the 8800gt, or you can spent the same amount of cash and get a serious hardcore gaming rig, i know its not a mac, but for the money it is so worth it