MacBook Air for WoW and D3?

[Morrius]

The new machines coming out at WWDC have reignited my lust for Apple products. I've seen speed comparisons between regular hard drives and solid state drives on YouTube, and it blew me away how responsive they were and how fast they loaded up WoW.

While the top of the line OMG retina display Pro is out of my price range, I am interested in a 13" MacBook Air. 1.8GHz i5, 256 GB SSD, 4GB RAM. I know that the integrated graphics on these machines are kind of crappy, so I'm curious if anyone has a current gen MacBook Air and how well it handles WoW and D3, under stressful situations like raiding The reports I've been hearing on the 4000 integrated graphics are a fairly significant boost, but not earth-shattering. I'm also curious about heat. My current machine gets pretty ot right around the bezel, so much so that it gives a little singe to my fingertips when I reach for the function keys.

For comparison, my current machine is a 2010 15" MBP. The real upgrade for me is the SSD.

There's also an option to upgrade to 8 GB of RAM for $100. Worth it?

 

[NorCalLights]

Look around the forums and you'll see lots of posts that say both World of Warcraft and Diablo 3 run just fine on the current Macbook Airs. They'll run even better on the ones released yesterday.

My Air (two generations ago) gets warm when playing D3. Such is life when playing games on a laptop.

The RAM upgrade is a no-brainer.

 

[CocoSS]

You cant watch some YouTube videos just to make sure

 

[Morrius]

You cant watch some YouTube videos just to make sure

The YouTube videos I've seen have been conflicting. I've seen some that say it barely runs on the lowest settings, and others that get 30 fps with medium settings in SW.

 

[unsignedbyte]

My 13" MBA 2011 can't handle wow & d3 that well, especially when plugged to a bigger screen. You can play them on the MBA, sure. But dont expect more then low-mid settings possible.

 

[ayeying]

The HD4000 would be a quite bit faster then the HD3000. I would upgrade to 8GB since you cannot upgrade later on anyways.

 

[hkim1983]

There's a few additional things you need to keep in mind about the HD 4000:

-The GPUs in the ULV line are clocked slower than their MBP counter-parts (and also their desktop counter-parts I'm assuming). Off hand, I don't recall the exact percentile difference, but there is an immaterial difference at lower settings, and much more noticeable difference at higher settings (although both are unplayable at higher settings) in a comparison that I saw online.

-That being said, Blizzard has been known for increasing system requirements in some of their 3D games in the past (WoW/Warcraft 3), so even if the Air runs D3 adequately now (which it should, as long as you don't go crazy on the settings), it may have trouble with the inevitable expansion(s).

I am not saying this to explicitly discourage you from buying the Air, because honestly, I'm choosing between the Air and the Pro myself, but it is something to keep in mind in terms of gaming.

 

[NTurner42]

I have a 2010 MacBook Pro 13 inch I play on all the time and it's a great little machine! It has the Nvidia 320m with 256mb and I raid weekly on WoW with a mix of setting in High and good with shadows and water on fair. 60 fps (capped) in an outside enviroment. In 25 man enviroments, I usually get around 30 fps with dips into the low 20's here and there, not too often, same with Stormwind. I also play Diablo on this machine, currently in act one on inferno and all the settings are low/off and I get 25-30 fps in the native resolution. (1280x800)

So, with all that I would imagine that the new Intel chip could handle the games at least 20% better.

And as someone stated above, I would upgrade to 8 GB of ram.

 

[Nunojfg]

Upgrading your Ram is not going to make a difference in gaming, its all about the graphics.

 

[NTurner42]

Upgrading your Ram is not going to make a difference in gaming, its all about the graphics.

Actually, the ram upgrade suggestion has nothing to do with gaming. The Air has it's ram soldered into the board, so better make sure you never need more than 4 GB, cause there's no upgrading in the future.