Buying advice: MBA M2 for a uni student

[YvetteSB]

I've been running a late 2015 MBA and looking to finally replace it!
I'm fairly incompetent when it comes to comparing tech specs, so looking for some buying advice.
I use my laptop religiously for uni, so lots of chrome, word/powerpoint/excel, notion usage, which ive had minimal problems with my current mba.
However, I'd love to be able to play games like sims/cities skylines/stardew valley on my new MBA without a collossal meltdown of my system which is current what's happening.

Should I be going for a 8 or 10 core GPU?
How much Ram can actually run my games?
Any advice is very welcomed and appreciated!

 

[Toutou]

I'll give you a data point for Cities Skylines — I used to play it on my M1 Air (the weaker, 7 core GPU) with 16 GB RAM and I remember that somewhere around 30k people with heavy traffic the time warp stopped working (the game was CPU-bound at that point). Graphics wise, it ran okay on Medium-ish settings and some low-DPI resolution (like 1440x900). And because the game hit both the CPU and the GPU, the machine ran at around 90 °C constantly (in a 22 °C room). So, playable but not very comfortable.

The M2 Air should handle it better, because it's a bit more powerful, but I would expect it to run on the hot side, it's still a passively cooled ultraportable. (Just in case you missed it, unlike your older Air, the current Air doesn't have a fan)

The Sims 4 should run just fine (some datapoints), even in native resolution (and cooler/faster if you use a lower one) and Stardew Valley is a non-issue. I'd say that the 8 core GPU should be fine unless you really want this to be your gaming machine (and in that case maybe get something with a fan instead)

Other than that, the M2 Air is absolutely the right machine for a student. If you're even thinking about any gaming, go with the 16 GB RAM version, which should also be your sweet spot for the school stuff (so you can just leave stuff open and not worry about the RAM). 24 GB, in my opinion, is overkill.
There's also the SSD thing -- the base 256 GB SSD is only 50-80% as fast as the larger options, which should not be an issue for office-type work, because it's still a very fast SSD, but it can eat a few percent of performance when the machine is running with the RAM nearly full. And obviously it means that any file transfer to/from a sufficiently fast (!) destination/source will be slower.

 

[Fishrrman]

Another vote for the new M2 MB Air...