[bleee]

Can someone who plays World of Warcraft an owns a new mac mini do a performance test for me? I want to buy a mac mini but it needs to run WoW well on a 20 inch wide screen display. I currently own a powerbook and the game is pretty much unplayable on my powerbook with a wide screen display. Please try various levels of graphic detail but run it at native resolution of the display.

[Commodus]

You'd need to tone down the details dramatically, and you probably wouldn't be happy with WOW at all at 1680x1050 (the native resolution of that display). Your PowerBook might not have the fastest video chipset, but it's a dedicated chipset with dedicated video RAM.

If you haven't already, I'd try lowering the resolution and/or detail on the PowerBook first. That should affect your frame rate more than anything.

[mduell]

If you want to run WoW well on a 20", buy the iMac Core Duo.

[magnificent 7]

I have a Mac mini Core Duo (1GB RAM) which I purchased as a system to do everything BUT gaming, I have a PC that I use solely for gaming but prefer to to everything else on alternate OSes due to the lack of maintenance required and in this case a more enjoyable user experience delivered by Mac OSX.

I play quite a bit of World of Warcraft on the PC but I saw a post like this one recently and it made me wonder how well the core duo would handle it.

My Core Duo usually uses a 17inch LG panel running at 1280x1024 and the PC uses a Dell 2005FPW (20inch widescreen) running at 1680x1050 for games.

To start with I installed wow on the core duo, with the 1.9.3 patch WoW became a universal binary by the way, and ran the game. With low detail settings the framerates I experienced were fairly low in any kind of open area with many people in it. Inside or in areas with few people the framerate was decent (up to 30fps) however in highly populated areas it would drop to around 10. I don't think there was anything else I could do to improve the performance by way of lowering/changing detail settings, however I'll be happy to hear if I've missed a trick somewhere.

Out of curiosity I hooked the mini up to my 2005FPW, and appart from making me want to buy another one so that I could have the mini running on a screen that size all the time, I noticed that it made little difference in framerates.

Now personally I found these framerates just about playable, if you really want to play WoW and just have a Mac mini the good news is it is do-able. However it wasn't what I would call decent performance.

[CPU]

Originally Posted by ajw

I have a Mac mini Core Duo (1GB RAM) which I purchased as a system to do everything BUT gaming, I have a PC that I use solely for gaming but prefer to to everything else on alternate OSes due to the lack of maintenance required and in this case a more enjoyable user experience delivered by Mac OSX.

I play quite a bit of World of Warcraft on the PC but I saw a post like this one recently and it made me wonder how well the core duo would handle it.

My Core Duo usually uses a 17inch LG panel running at 1280x1024 and the PC uses a Dell 2005FPW (20inch widescreen) running at 1680x1050 for games.

To start with I installed wow on the core duo, with the 1.9.3 patch WoW became a universal binary by the way, and ran the game. With low detail settings the framerates I experienced were fairly low in any kind of open area with many people in it. Inside or in areas with few people the framerate was decent (up to 30fps) however in highly populated areas it would drop to around 10. I don't think there was anything else I could do to improve the performance by way of lowering/changing detail settings, however I'll be happy to hear if I've missed a trick somewhere.

Out of curiosity I hooked the mini up to my 2005FPW, and appart from making me want to buy another one so that I could have the mini running on a screen that size all the time, I noticed that it made little difference in framerates.

Now personally I found these framerates just about playable, if you really want to play WoW and just have a Mac mini the good news is it is do-able. However it wasn't what I would call decent performance.

Thanks for the WoW info. I had hoped the mini would do better. My old pc notebook with a 9200 easily outpaces it

[CheesePuff]

Originally Posted by CPU

Thanks for the WoW info. I had hoped the mini would do better. My old pc notebook with a 9200 easily outpaces it

Maybe because the 9200 is a dedicated graphics card...?

(yes that was sarcasm)

[bleee]

Thanks for the reply guys, I'm very disapointed to say the least =((( I was really hoping that the mini could pull it off. I will most likely wait for the PowerMac to be moved to Core Duo before I buy another mac but who knows when that could be. I'm using a dedicated pc now just for gaming with a 9800pro 128MB on the Dell 20inch at native resolution and 2x anti alias. As for the iMac core duo it's a nice solution but then I would be left with a 20 dell display sitting around.

[harrisjamieh]

Originally Posted by bleee

Thanks for the reply guys, I'm very disapointed to say the least =((( I was really hoping that the mini could pull it off. I will most likely wait for the PowerMac to be moved to Core Duo before I buy another mac but who knows when that could be. I'm using a dedicated pc now just for gaming with a 9800pro 128MB on the Dell 20inch at native resolution and 2x anti alias. As for the iMac core duo it's a nice solution but then I would be left with a 20 dell display sitting around.

You could always get the 20" Dell display you have, and hook it up to the iMac Core Duo's DVI port, so you can have dual screen......

Also, the new PowerMacs will not have a Core Duo chip, as it is a laptop chip, and is only used in the iMac and Mac Mini for space saving and heat reasons. The PowerMacs have LOTS of space inside them, and they are high performance machines, hence they will have a much more powerful CPU. I think, IIRC, speculation says that new Conroe or Woodcrest CPUs will be used... though note that is speculation (though not on my part).