I’m looking at buying a new laptop. I play primarily on a desktop PC, but I’d like the ability to play on a laptop if I’m traveling or something like that–it’s mostly for productivity, which leads me toward the (considerably cheaper and lighter) Air.
Have any of you actually played on the new M2 Air? I’m concerned about the lack of active cooling killing performance after a few minutes. But I’d like to try and quantify that before buying a 14" MBP instead.
Thanks
M1 is slightly better than Vega 8 / Ryzen 5800U, while M2 is slightly better than 680M / Ryzen 6800U in terms of raw performance for the game. The M2 Air reviews that put the MBA through continuous workload like a gaming benchmark do show the difference between M1 and M2 to be smaller there - so expect it to be slightly better than M1.
And the question is about your productivity - is macOS optimal for it?
I’d consider active cooling for any kind of laptop you may be inclined to play with, especially MacBooks.
By that I mean a cooling platform with a fan blowing up onto the bottom of the laptop or some other sane solution.
The M1s are actually pretty fantastic at cooling. I have the M1 MBP and I’ve very seldom even heard the fan start up during wow, which was the polar opposite of my 2015 intel model.
they are certainly better than apples intel laptops because they had inadaquate cooling then too and those run way worse than apple silicon.
but make no mistake even my M1 max macbook pro will hard throttle and hit 100C if I don’t change apples default fan curve. fortunately this thing has enough fan power in it that once I do change curve it will stay below 90C.
the issue with the base m2 is it runs even hotter than base m1 and has no improvements to cooling so people HAVE seen them throttle with no ability to crank fans to avoid it.
That said, wow may or may not be able to cause throttling in many (if any situations) so most users will probably be fine unless they are power users, but my hope is the m2 pro max and above have at the very least the fans taht M1 pro and max do.
I play WoW on my new MBA - base model 8gb of ram, it plays at a level 4 in the graphics screen. My 2070 Super plays at a level 7 - so it’s not too bad, it goes get a little warm
My 1 year old intel bigboy 27" Imac is at the genius bar for what was diagnosed as a “corrupted RAM issue” ( hopefully, this should fix those god awful RED SCREENS I only get playing this game, & the more recent !Hash mismatch error notifications i’ve been getting the last few months)
So, with the guidance wow gamer /tech apple specialist and th screenshot of the “recommended specs for dragonflight” He also thought the M2 MBA 8BG would do just fine for me as a interim device until my big boy is fixed. j
So thats what I brought home yesterday, this is my first laptop, as I have always had Imacs, and its doing well so far, But i am interested in what the correct settings should be for it, I like operating everything at the highest settings possible, ad lag is never an issue for me, even in those Epic BGS when people complain about Lag. Im on a hard line cable ethernet connection and last night, had the best performance i can ever recall in a IOC on this little laptop, but my images are a bit choppy looking, and i don’t think i have my settings right, as I am using my Thunderbolt screen as my main, and i would like to get the specs right for it.