OS X New Macbook Air and Eve Online/WoW

[kulchecj]

Work just ordered me a new laptop, going from old crappy dells to new 2014 macbook air 13'' with the i7 and 8gb of ram.

My boss plays eve all the time so he knows im going to install it."

Basically what i need is insight on low settings for both WoW and Eve Online, What can i get away with? What is heat like? i know the intel 5000 is the chokepoint but would like input from yall.

Thanks a bunch!

 

[soulsyphon]

macbook air isn't for gaming. its not going to run well.

simple.

 

[kulchecj]

That is obvious I was simply asking for insight on perfrmance from those who have run the specified games. It Wil mostly be used to send daily reports. Time cards as well as company emails.

 

[saturnotaku]

Have you considered doing a search for gameplay videos on YouTube?

 

[moggis2]

I play WoW on an 11" base MBA (2014) when I travel. I mainly do hc 10 man raiding, and it's possible to find a workable compromise between graphic detail levels and frame rate. I play with external keyboard/mouse, so I cannot really comment on heat (but expect that it at least will be warm and that fans will be audible).

 

[AtomicGrog]

Eve will technically work, I had it up and running on a i5 13" air with 4Gb of memory with no problems. The SSD is the saving grace to be honest...

You wont be able to have all the graphics settings on and in large combat scenario's you'll have to switch off a lot of the features - brackets, missile effects, drones etc. but that's not every day, in fact a large number of eve players never see combat period.

Give it a try, sounds like you're getting the machine anyway.

 

[kulchecj]

Eve will technically work, I had it up and running on a i5 13" air with 4Gb of memory with no problems. The SSD is the saving grace to be honest...

You wont be able to have all the graphics settings on and in large combat scenario's you'll have to switch off a lot of the features - brackets, missile effects, drones etc. but that's not every day, in fact a large number of eve players never see combat period.

Give it a try, sounds like you're getting the machine anyway.

Right on man, yeah, i am getting it by force, i prefered the HP with the 745M or what ever it had that they took away from us but it is what it is. Ive always played with lowest settings, no missile effects, drones, pew pew visible etc. How bad did she heat up on you?

 

[antonis]

For EVE I have no idea as I've never played it. Mind, though, that you can always boot windows - without even going through bootcamp - from an external usb3/tb drive and get the best your machine can deliver, without wasting valuable internal space.

WoW will run fine on this machine. HD 5000 is capable to handle it on medium settings (referring to the mac version, now). I've played for a few days on my MBA mid-2013 when my desktop mac was not available. In case of WoW, the fact that MBA is equipped with a good cpu will also help as it is very cpu oriented.

The only thing you should worry about, IMHO, is that the laptop is going to get hot.

 

[AtomicGrog]

Right on man, yeah, i am getting it by force, i prefered the HP with the 745M or what ever it had that they took away from us but it is what it is. Ive always played with lowest settings, no missile effects, drones, pew pew visible etc. How bad did she heat up on you?

Didn't play it long (a day or so) but it didnt seem overly hot, iirc I'd just lost a drive or something on my iMac so it was a stopgap.

Eve's an odd game, a lot of people used to turn off special effects, many dont even know it has sound... all to help support what is a unique pvp experience... where else can you combat in a 1000+ vs. 1000+ player situation?

 

[Nuttydev]

No idea about Eve, but I played WoW quite a bit on my 2012 MBA (1.8GHz i5, 4GB ram, HD4000) and it ran perfectly fine at 1440x900 on medium with around 70fps out of raids, so you'll be good. However, it did run very hot (CPU hit 95°C) so the fans were always on full blast and it made it uncomfortable to play as I was using the built in keyboard.

 

[nexus4life]

Was playing Warlords of Draenor Beta earlier today and decided to see how it would run on my 2014 Macbook Air 11". It played with all settings on High giving around ~35-40 fps outside of popular areas, and ~20-25 in Orgrimmar/Stormwind/New Raid Areas. And that's a non-optimized game (new technologies and what not with WoD) so who knows how well regular WoW plays on this thing, could be way better. But overall for a machine with integrated graphics, I was pretty impressed with the performance.