MacBook Games -Specific

[wcalderini]

I apologize in advance becuase I know it's been discussed to death in other threads but I did not see this subject addressed specificaly and I was wondering if anyone could give me some "real world" insight.
I'm in the market to get my daughter (14yr Old) a new laptop.
She will use it mostly for writing, but she has a lot of "legacy" games she still enjoys playing also. (Her current laptop is a VERY aged Toshiba running Windows XP)
Doing due diligence, as a good dad, I loaded up a hard drive with 2 "deal breaker" games (WoW and The Sims 2) and went to my local Apple store to check out performance.
On the Mac Book (Stock with 1GB of Ram) I was able to "tweak" WoW to acceptable playability.This was NOT the case with the Sims 2.
I really want her in a Mac product as she is a creative little cuss and I feel the iLife suite offers SO much more in the way of easy out of the box creativity, but she will need to to re-boot into wndows often to run some of her legacy stuff although I feel I can phase that out eventually with software replacements.
Finally my question.
Any real world experience out there on how the Sims 2 plays in WinXP in Bootcamp? (They had no demo units available to test so I had to use the Mac versions of both of these games) I also plan on upping the Ram to 2 GB if that makes a difference.
It will need to be a fairly dramatic improvement over what I saw on the mac side as even in a very low pop house with the graphic settings at "low" the game was very choppy and nearly unplayable.
Any real world experience, advice, or suggestions will be appreciated/
Thanks.
WRC

 

[Scarlet Fever]

Unless portability is a must, i think an iMac would suit your needs better than a MacBook. They have a dedicated GPU, so games like WoW and The Sims 2 will run comfortably.

Have a look in this thread. there may be some real-world benchmarks in there for you

 

[sarcosis]

I have to concur with Scarlet Fever. An iMac would much better suite your needs with what you need. It will give a dedicated GPU for WoW. Graphics don't matter so much for the Sims 2. I know cuz my Fiance plays it all the time and I've had to tweak her computer to make it run better. Sims runs off of Hard Drive space, Ram, CPU, etc. Everything except for the video card. I know it's odd, but this is the case. So faster hard drive and a boat load of ram will be great for you. Also with a desktop, there is less potential of dropping it or leaving it somewhere.

 

[killerrobot]

I also agree about the iMac, and just wanted to put in another 2 cents worth about the RAM. If you're really going to game on it, I would say 2 g is the minimum amount needed. Sims 2 should work fine without getting anywhere near "choppy" at that level.

 

[wcalderini]

Thanks for the input.

Unfortunately it DOES need to be a laptop, so I guess I'll have to up the ante and look at a MacBook pro. Guess I'll see if I can get a deal on the recently discontinued models or a re-furb at the Apple store.
Thanks again.

WRC

 

[JNB]

Unfortunately it DOES need to be a laptop, so I guess I'll have to up the ante and look at a MacBook pro. Guess I'll see if I can get a deal on the recently discontinued models or a re-furb at the Apple store.

And you happen to be in luck today. The refurb store is chock-full right now.