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2010 Mini and World of Warcraft?
- Thread starter BigCanoe
- Start date
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I have a video on my YouTube channel (beaverman3001) that I'll link to when I get home. The performance on wow on the Mac mini, especially after the latest graphics update two days ago, is great. I can play in most situations just fine on ultra settings, you can easily play on high settings with no issues. I should probably make a new performance video since this graphics update.
My experience
All my settings that "greatly affect" performance are at lowest or near lowest.
I can't remember my exact frame rates so I will have to re-post with that info. Away from the big cities everything runs great. I get a little lag in SW until the graphics catch up then it's fine. In Dal, when there are a lot of players in town, lag is fairly bad and riding a mount is almost unusable. When there aren't as many players around the lag is gone. All 5 and 10-mans run great. 25-mans run great on these settings too. Before I turned my settings down 25-mans were laggy and 40-mans were almost unplayable; I had to trust the tanks and healers were doing their jobs while I spammed hits. Wintergrasp battles were not playable but I haven't done WG in a while and I can't remember if that was before or after I adjusted the settings. Thankfully I don't have a set of pvp gear (yet!) so WG isn't a huge deal to me.
A previous post said they play at high settings and it runs great but I can't imagine that works in Dalaran, IMO.
One thing that has happened a couple of times is when I go back to windowed mode, so I could fire up Safari, iTunes, etc-, when I go back to WoW the graphics were EXTREMELY laggy for a while. A couple times I had to restart WoW to fix it. I suppose this is from the shared memory but I'm not sure.
Another thing, WoW makes my Mini quite warm and I would go so far to say it is borderline "hot". WoW is my only app that does this; everything else like iPhoto is fine. I would have to think that other games would do the same thing, especially given that WoW is fairly low on graphics requirements. To help out my little Mini I position a small fan, about 3-4" dia, so it blows down and across the top of the Mini. This works amazingly well and it's actually quite a cool looking fan. Only $6, too. It can be tilted to point straight down and originally I was going to put it on top of the Mini and have it blow straight down but the fan vibrates so I figured this would not be a great idea for the hard drive. Since I have a prop balancer, from messing with RC airplanes, I balanced the fan blade. I was able to get most of the vibration out of the fan but since it is a really cheap fan I could not get it perfect. So I plan to leave it along side the Mini until I upgrade the hard drive with a SSD which will be much more tolerant to vibration.
The SSD is planned but if I have to adjust my upgrade budget I will put in a Momentus XT. 4 or 8 GB of Ram is planned also. The memory upgrade may help the graphics too but I have not come across real data on that yet.
I hope my Mini experience is of help to you. Happy WoWing!
All my settings that "greatly affect" performance are at lowest or near lowest.
I can't remember my exact frame rates so I will have to re-post with that info. Away from the big cities everything runs great. I get a little lag in SW until the graphics catch up then it's fine. In Dal, when there are a lot of players in town, lag is fairly bad and riding a mount is almost unusable. When there aren't as many players around the lag is gone. All 5 and 10-mans run great. 25-mans run great on these settings too. Before I turned my settings down 25-mans were laggy and 40-mans were almost unplayable; I had to trust the tanks and healers were doing their jobs while I spammed hits. Wintergrasp battles were not playable but I haven't done WG in a while and I can't remember if that was before or after I adjusted the settings. Thankfully I don't have a set of pvp gear (yet!) so WG isn't a huge deal to me.
A previous post said they play at high settings and it runs great but I can't imagine that works in Dalaran, IMO.
One thing that has happened a couple of times is when I go back to windowed mode, so I could fire up Safari, iTunes, etc-, when I go back to WoW the graphics were EXTREMELY laggy for a while. A couple times I had to restart WoW to fix it. I suppose this is from the shared memory but I'm not sure.
Another thing, WoW makes my Mini quite warm and I would go so far to say it is borderline "hot". WoW is my only app that does this; everything else like iPhoto is fine. I would have to think that other games would do the same thing, especially given that WoW is fairly low on graphics requirements. To help out my little Mini I position a small fan, about 3-4" dia, so it blows down and across the top of the Mini. This works amazingly well and it's actually quite a cool looking fan. Only $6, too. It can be tilted to point straight down and originally I was going to put it on top of the Mini and have it blow straight down but the fan vibrates so I figured this would not be a great idea for the hard drive. Since I have a prop balancer, from messing with RC airplanes, I balanced the fan blade. I was able to get most of the vibration out of the fan but since it is a really cheap fan I could not get it perfect. So I plan to leave it along side the Mini until I upgrade the hard drive with a SSD which will be much more tolerant to vibration.
The SSD is planned but if I have to adjust my upgrade budget I will put in a Momentus XT. 4 or 8 GB of Ram is planned also. The memory upgrade may help the graphics too but I have not come across real data on that yet.
I hope my Mini experience is of help to you. Happy WoWing!
I'm perfectly fine in dalaran with everything maxed except with shadows turned down to half. This could very greatly between servers though so keep that in mind.
SMC Fan control at 2800 rpm keeps my mini at perfectly fine temperatures over extended hours fo playing.
Everyones experience will differ depending on faction, server population, time you mostly play. But I have on issues with high settings.
SMC Fan control at 2800 rpm keeps my mini at perfectly fine temperatures over extended hours fo playing.
Everyones experience will differ depending on faction, server population, time you mostly play. But I have on issues with high settings.
You should be able to play it perfectly fine, but don't expect to be running it at 60fps on the highest of high settings ^^
So far it is fairly decent and my settings are largely the same as pre-Cata but with a few tweaks. Most everything is turned down low except I have distance and particle density turned up a little. Sun shafts and water effects are down all the way. Particle density has to be turned up a little otherwise you will not see the ever important effects that may kill you. : )
Sorry I don't have my exact settings but I will try to repost with them when I get a chance.
Sorry I don't have my exact settings but I will try to repost with them when I get a chance.