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 But if you think about it the 256mb card is getting out of date.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