I’m going to get a MacBook 14 inch, which one would be best, M2 pro or M2Max?
It won’t be the primary gaming computer as I have a desktop, but I do often play on a laptop. I mainly play WoW, retail and classic. I also play some D3 here and there. Would like to do some future proofing without doing complete overkill for what I’d use it for. In addition to being gaming laptop I’d also use it for school (going back to college), the plan is a math major with focus on statistics and data science.
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch
As an owner of m1 max, i don’t regret it. hell i wish i could justify upgrading to m2 max. it’d be noticable.
if it were me though max all the way, it’s 2x graphics performance not just for gaming but also for external display pushing.
in addition. you do get more bandwidth with thunderbolt 4. but only if you really think there is a chance you may use laptop for anything performant at any time. if you truly won’t use it for anything except facebook, non media/gaming/graphics work, then you don’t need max at all.
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Glad to see a regular around here giving praise to the M1 Max. Helps my decision as well. I was looking at the M2 Max 16” MacBook Pro and I think I’ve made my decision. Time to finally retire the 2016 MacBook Pro (which is still actually performing pretty well, even in intense fights).
you won’t be disappointed. i literally run max settings in dragonflight and get up to 120 fps in many locations, but most demanding areas that are heavy on cpu will be smooth 60 everywhere with only two tweaks, compute turned off and render scale set to 50 with FSR doing ai upscaling so i still get a crisp output at native resolution.
My big tip though is get software called Macs Fan Control, set fan control based on gpu temp and let yourself see gpu temp in menu bar. The default can curve from apple is bad, and it’ll let cpu actually hit 100C and throttle (for literally no reason) when automatic control by this software can actually keep that from ever happening with the built in fans without issue, apple just has a bad fan curve, not bad hardware here and it’s fortunate we can fix that with a pretty cheap program
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Oh! Thanks for the fan tip that’s handy to know.
What parameters do you use in Macs Fan Control? Your other tips for getting the most out of a Mac have been really helpful for me with my M2 Mac mini (Pro, 12 core).