MacBook and MacBook Pro?

So not too long from now, I will be heading to my first year of college. My father is most likely purchasing me a MacBook for my graduation computer, and I'm curious if this will be able to play Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 on a good level. I'm hoping medium high graphics, but I don't think a MacBook is capable of that. My first priority for this laptop will be its educational purposes (notes, internet, etc.) but I also would enjoy being able to get back into Guild Wars, especially with the future release of GW2.

Now, other laptops are possibilities, but I'm hoping I can stay within the range of MacBook or MacBook Pro, as I do love Macs.

Here are the specs pages. MacBook:

http://www.apple.com/macbook/specs.html

MacBook Pro:

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/specs-13inch.html

If anyone knows of laptops in the same price range that can perform better than a MacBook or MacBook Pro for school work or gaming, that would be appreciated also! Thank you!

my understanding is that Mac does not support GW. I have to use Boot camp to play GW on my mac and it sucks or at least Windows Vista sucks, i get snow and freezing of the computer after a certain amount of time has elapsed on the game. I have to close it out and restart the game or shut the computer off completely and let it rest. My recommendation is if you want to play video games on the laptop don't get a mac.

Really? Wow, that's not good at all! I think I heard something about that a while back, now that I think about it. Thank you!

Does anyone know of a different laptop that will suffice? Maybe high resolution for Guild Wars and won't lag the game, on which I can do school work and other tasks still.

I'm looking around the 13 inch screen range, I'll have to take it to and from my classes.

Try the Dell Studio 14 range.

Don't expect amazing game graphics though. It'll play gw1 fine, gw2 is anyones guess right now.

I wouldn't just limit yourself to the 13" market. You pay quite a bit extra for that drop in screen size...

14-15" screens are still easily portable, and don't weigh all that much more.

Cool, thank you. I hear Newegg is great for buying computers, I'm just really not a computer know-it-all so I have no idea how to search for one that has great system specs. I'm willing to go to a 14-15" screen, as long as it's not too large of a laptop.

what's your budget? I'd be happy to point you in the right direction if I had some figures to work with.

Yeah, give us your budget and we'll try to find you a good bang for the buck. Other than that, any particular screen size, resolution, battery life that you want?

I've shopped for a laptop for university/gaming recently and it can sometimes be a mess considering the amount of options you have at your disposal.

One last thing, check the forums at www.notebookreview.com you'll probably find them to be quite helpful.

I'm looking at a budget of $1000-$1100. Something with a battery life around five hours, hopefully light weight. I'm not worried about screen size as long as it isn't tiny or too gigantic, maybe 15". As far as settings for Guild Wars, I would like to be able to play it on medium-high (preferably high, but I won't be too picky!) without lag. I'm just really wanting one that will play GW2, even though nobody is positive on the specs yet.

Thanks for the feedback everyone, you guys are great with help!

A laptop that can play GW2 is going to require a dedicated video card --- laptops with dedicated video cards are much more powerful and consume allot more battery life. Anything over 2 hrs battery life for a "gaming" laptop is considered good. Of course if you only want a 15" then you might find what you are looking for, just expect to pay a premium for that longer lasting battery.

This sounds like an overheating issue, not a Vista issue. Just knock you graphics settings back a bit - particularly, set AA back to 2x if it's on 4x.

@OP - almost any laptop that costs the same as a Mac Pro will perform better - except perhaps a Sony, or other high end brand. Others will point you to specific models - I'll just say to make sure you get one with a good "discrete" video chip with it's own graphics RAM.

Ah, okay. I was reading about some laptops and I understand this now, I think a 1 1/2 hour battery life would be fine. I found this laptop while looking at the site Tijo reccommended:

http://www.notebookreview.com/price/...568&productID=

I know it's mainly for gaming, but it looks like it would play Guild Wars beautifully - and top notch. Does anyone know of a laptop similar to this, maybe a little cheaper? It seems this one has everything in perfection.

Edit: Also, what are general specs on a laptop to be able to play on high settings, with no lag? And what video card/memory?

You could for a laptop with switchable graphics in order to increase battery life. Unfortunately, no models with switchable graphics come to mind right now. You can also change the battery from a 6 cell to a 9 cell in order to increase autonomy as well.

Don't expect the battery to last long when gaming though.

EDIT: In response to your post below, 2-3 hours should be achieved easily enough on a laptop with a decent GPU. It may require a bit of tweaking depending on the laptop, but nothing too difficult.

I'm mainly just looking for a 1 1/2 to 2 hour battery life for when I'm taking notes in class, etc. Not for gaming.

Not officially...

i recently found a site that made a unofficial cider client for guild wars

Clicky

It's a very small dmg file that triggers the download of the client... (it might take 30-45 min to download and install it. It's keeping you on the same 'please wait' screen the whole time, but that's normal.)

I use it on my `10 unibody MBP and it works like a charm, except for the `@`key

I don't know if this is legal or might get you banned, but i'm using it and still playing the game, but use it at your own risk

btw many ppl say macs are wayy overpriced. this is true, expect for the 13`MBP which gives you a hell of lot bang for your bucks. And if your intention is not primarily to game on your system (aside from guild wars) i certainly would go for the 13`cheapest MBP.

My MBP easily reaches 6 hours when just doing some office tasks and internet. if you disable airport it might last even longer.
when gaming or watching a movie it last for 2-3 hours tops. Remember though that they (MBP) are made out of aluminum, which is a damn good heat conductor, so prepare to get a hot mac when gaming

that's a great laptop, but honestly it's overkill for GW1 or even GW2 - that's a top end gaming laptop.. the kind that Alienware and similar companies charges $2500 for. :/ If I were you I'd save $600 and get the one below, it will run away with GW1 and play GW2 very well also.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834220827

Yeah, definitely overkill for GW and not to mention it's rather bulky.

EDIT: On another note, if you like the look of the machine, the G53JW will be out soon. Practically the same as the G73JH but with a GTX460M, 15" and a USB 3.0 port

The N61 is also a good choice, good GPU for the resolution it offers, good CPU as well. As a bonus, all asus laptops come with a 2 year warranty in the US and Canada and a 1 year accidental damage warranty that you have to activate though,.

See, that one looks so much better and weighs less. I just really want a laptop that will play GW2 on high settings and smooth gameplay, because I don't want to invest in something that will give me medium-high and a "good" experience.

I actually don't like the look of the Asus G73JH, but the specs are awesome and the keyboard is so nice, what with the light-up feature and all. However I have heard so many horrible reviews of it due to technical issues (Blue/Gray Screen of Death, Graphics Card Update Problems), I'm leaning more towards not purchasing it.

the asus G73H is way to heavy your better off with a toshiba qosmio

I use my macBook Pro to run GW1 fine. If I'm just logging in for a few minutes I have crossover game sinstalled to open gw. If I plan on gaming for any length of time I just boot into windows on it.

The one problem you might have, which can be the case in several laptops, is overheating. I use smc(?) to control my fans when booting into windows, as they tend to take a while to start up.

From owning one, i can tell you that fixes have been released for pretty much every problem it had (New bios for CPU throttling, vBios for the screens of death). However, to say that it's big would be an understatement. Personally i'd go with the N61 or a MSI (their new models look like toys though).

The new 15" hp envy look very good and from what i've read don't seem to suffer from the traditional HP notebook issues. http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/ca/en...0-4166179.html The specs are also pretty good. If you prefer a more traditional look, take a look at models from Clevo.

Check this reseller for more laptops with gaming capabilities options:
http://www.xoticpc.com/

EDIT: Definitely take a look at the qosmios as Lourens suggested. Be sure to check the reviews though, some models (at least the older ones, don't know about the newer ones) tend to overheat while others stay cool.

I think for now, I'll keep my eye on the Qosmios - It really won me over for the time being, it's just the size that is keeping me on the fence. I love it, but I need portability as well.

http://us.toshiba.com/computers/lapt...X500/X505-Q887

I also really like this laptop that Elder III posted earlier:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834220827

Thanks for your help everyone, it means a lot to a gamer who doesn't know a lot about computer specs!

One last thing, i suggest you also ask in the what notebook should i buy forum at notebookreview and cross-reference the choices we gave you here. You should have a pretty solid idea with recommendations from both sites. You can also give them our recommendations and see their thoughts on it.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834127279 best bang for your buck

Looks nice, can play GW2 on medium/high and isn't that weird looking and heavy as a gaming laptop

I see a lot of misinformation in this thread..

Macs will run gw buttery smooth if you just use WINE. You don't even need to waste money on crossover. WINE comes with a preset just for guildwars and is free software. Open source. My brother uses it all the time.

There's also the obvious option of buying a copy of windows 7, installing it onto the mac with bootcamp and using software (open source too) to run windows 7 without having to reboot. Yeah. Lots of people have done it.
This would also ensure gw2 compatibility without experimenting with settings in WINE or waiting for a preset to be made or bothering to restart your computer to run windows.

Keep in mind the new macbook will give you 10 hours of battery life, (less when gaming, obviously), weighs less than most laptops by a good pound, and will be a lot more dependable than anything else you're looking at.

The new macbook base model comes with the geforce 320m, which is an integreated chip and will share memory with your laptop's ram. Generally this would be a bad thing, but the 320m is brand new and has been designed fairly well. It is replacing the 9400m and is quite a bit faster as you can see from apple's website.

There's a lot of controversy over the 320m, but in general you can compare it to the 9600m ddr2 gpu.


9600M:
Pavilion dv7-1050eg ( 1280x800)
T9400
4096 MB
500 / 400MHz
512MB GDDR2 175.53
3dmark: 4419

320M:
MacBook Pro 13" 2010
P8600
4096 MB
3dmark: 4754


Lots of people have reported playing starcraft 2 and bad company 2 very easily on this card as well, so I wouldn't worry about gw2 performance. ANet has stated they are designing gw2 to run on a wide range of machines, just as gw1 did.

What I want you to get out of this is to not rule out the macbook. OSX is hands down designed better than any other OS for actually get stuff done fast, and apple is extremely well known for making dependable hardware.
You're looking at qosmios.. which is the exact opposite. Huge, clunky, unstable things, just to get ~10 more fps out of gw2?

Well I guess the choice is yours in the end.

Misinformation indeed....

The MBP uses a GeForce 330M as it's dGPU. It is not a gaming grade GPU, but it can play many games on low to medium settings. It should be noted, however, that the 330M will struggle with Guild Wars 2 on anything over a mix of medium/low settings at resolutions over 1440x900.

In addition, Apple makes NONE of the hardware in their notebooks. The only thing they produce are the aesthetics (the frame and fashion design) The hardware is all standard, run of the mill x86 hardware from Intel and nVidia. I believe they use either Samsung or LG drives for their disk drive supplier. This may have changed.

Also, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a Toshiba. 2 of my friends have the large Qosmio notebooks, one of which is 3 years old and still perfect. The other is about a year old, and fast as hell even now.

10 FPS? This will beat a Macbook pro in GW2 by at LEAST 30 FPS. I do mean AT LEAST.

Buy this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834214050

And slaughter Guild Wars 2 like it was Pacman. Also, it's at an excellent price.

It has nVidia's new 460M, which features Optimus. That means the GPU can completely shut itself down when gaming, consuming 0W of power, therefore increasing battery life substantially. Yes, it's big, but... it gets nearly 4 hours of battery life when you aren't gaming, and even while gaming, you'll still get at least and hour and half.

Agreed, don't go MBP if you intend to do some serious gaming.

Impressive battery life and something that will play GW2 decently on a 1080p. If you plan on buying that one, just make sure that your classrooms have enough space for it.

My experience with my old toshiba (bought in 2005) has been a blast. My M40 literally went through laptop hell and is still working (it got wet, dropped, i stopped counting the desk corners i hit with it etc.). There might be a few dents in the casing, but no cracks or broken parts, pretty sturdy stuff.

Since then i went with asus (N50 and G73) and so far i've been satisfied with product quality. I can't really comment on other brands from personal experience, but from relatives' experiences i'd stay away from anything HP except their envy and business lines.

EDIT: Since the topic pops up quite often, it's not GW the guys recommending PCs are worried about, pretty much anything can tear through GW at this point (even the new intel IGPs), it's GW2. See the comments about the 330M and GW2 in this thread and what the OP wants for GW2, it's basically why we can't recommend the MBP at this point (256mb of video memory could end up being a problem at higher resolutions as well).

I purchased a MacBook back in Feb this year (specs 2.26 GHz IC2Duo, 2GB mem, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M) and setup bootcamp and windows 7 to play window games. GW is fine to play. I never run higher than the mid graphic setting and have enjoyed the game immensely. Just to give you an idea, this was a recent screenie I took with the settings I usually play with and this was taken with the highest setting on my 2.5 year old imac, so not a laptop, running XP. The screenies are saved as .jpg which accounts for some of the image degradation. BTW, I usually play on my laptop instead of my desktop, even though I can go higher quality on it.

Personally, I went macbook, because it had everything I wanted at a price I could afford. I didn't have to worry about buying windows since students at my school can download it for free through a program with microsoft. If you're planning on taking your comp to class alot, I would take into account size of the laptop as well. The other reason I chose MacBook is because it's light, yet has a big screen, and can run games. Personally, I still like their iBooks line more though (a little smaller/lighter) and wish they still made those

Send me a PM if you'd like more info about playing GW on a macbook since I just stumbled across this thread and probably won't be checking it again

I run GW on my macbook pro using wineskin. You need a special version of GW which is available online and accepted by Anet. The graphics are amazing as they are full HD, much better than my pc. The only issue I have is that as wineskin is an emulator I cannot use push-to-talk on Vent but I get around that by having my mic open all the time and just turning it off and on when I want to speak. You will need to get used to the diff keys though as you need fn+F-key to access them and the CTRL/ALT keys are slightly diff. To get out you need to ALT+F12 and then can get back to the desktop.

All in all it works well and I would recommend the macbook pro.

The point is, Guild Wars 2 will absolutely rip a MBP apart given their current resolutions + dGPU.... I mean tear it to pieces.

my recommendation is bring ur desktop to your dorm and buy a mac book pro for school work. Macbook pros have the best battery life and will get you through the whole day of notetaking in class. You dont want to go cheap on battery life if you are using laptops for educational purposes(battery dying in class is soo annoying). Also DO YOURSELF A FAVOR AND USE THE MAC OS OPERATING SYSTEM(no bootcamp bullshit). The fact that macs dont support games means that you wont be gaming in class(aka wont be distracted you get better grades). And when you go back to your dorm you have ur desktop waiting for you.

if all you want is to take notes in classes get a $200 netbook and be done with it.... 14 hrs battery life and weighs nothing, so even the wimpy kids these days can handle it. Then get a desktop to game on.

Did I miss this on the Qosmio site? I'll get this one - it's a lot cheaper than the $1600 one and I trust you that it will play wonderfully. My only concern is the i5 processor instead of i7; will I be able to donwload multiple games (GW, GW2, maybe Oblivion/Fallout 3) on that? If that's way out of the question, don't be afraid to tell me. I often have high standards.


Yeah, I'm not taking a desktop to my dorm...I'd rather have a laptop so I can go portable. I would plug it in when playing GW anyway, I never game outside of my home really.

You all have been so helpful! I think a Macbook is out of the equation now...I might take Elder III's advice and invest in a Netbook for notes.

Yes, it will play all the games you listed. The i5 is essentially a quad core, thanks to Hyper Threading. Games threat it more like a quad core than a dual core. It will be fine for several years to come.

And with 4 hrs battery life... you won't need a netbook.

Sweet. What is the difference in performance (speed, memory & gaming wise) bewteen an i7 and an i5?

Here ya go. I picked the fastest Core i5 for desktops and pit it against the slowest Core i7 for desktops. The reasoning is simple: The mobile Corei7's run at 1.7GHz, while the mobile i5's run at 2.4+. In this case, the difference is between a 1.7GHz Corei7 720M and a Corei5 460M at 2.53GHz.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/145?vs=108

The few game results are at the bottom. Don't look at them from the standpoint of FPS, but rather the difference between them. As you can see, in Crysis, the i5 beats the i7. However, the slower i7 wins out in Farcry. Really, if a game is super well multi threaded, the i7s can win out, but most games thrive on 2-4 cores if they are multithreaded. So... in other words, the dual core + Hyperthreading Corei5 is more than enough for gaming.

yep, really no need to go beyond an i5 CPU right now if gaming is your primary concern; you won't regret having one, they are quite nice indeed.

Yep, add to that that the mobile i7 dissipate quite a lot of heat and are rather power hungry. Between the highest i5 model and lowest i7, get the i5.