I would buy those, but honestly my desktop power hackintosh is better for tweaking to support macOS. I saw that you used a hackintosh earlier.
MMO’s are all about the CPU. Get the newest gen possible at the highest clock speed. For laptops get a cooling station!! (40 mans will be CPU intensive) Plus since we are rolling back to older code. You can go into your config file and unlock more cores and treads for the CPU to play WoW.
With the exception of core count(sometimes core speeds) and hyper threading, the intel i5 and i7 arent much different. The TDP is still similar and they both with play WoW quite well with a decent GPU or a good IGPU might be a bit of a struggle in cities or massive world PVP, but will be ok otherwise.
Wow in particular is CPU bound a lot, but not all games now a days are CPU bound more than they used to. If its 1080p its the CPU for sure, if its 2-4K resolution, its all GPU basically with some cpu useage.
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I’ve tried playing retail wow on macbook pros without dedicated graphics and it is horrible.
If you want to only play classic wow then get a laptop with a graphics card. it will make all the difference. Please dont listen to these guys that say it can be run on a toaster.
If you want to play other games besides classic wow (or wow). Please get a windows based laptop with at least a 1060 gtx, 16gb of ram, ssd, at least 8th gen processor or higher.
I played on a macbook pro for 3 years with wow. I upgraded to a windows based computer and it was night and day. I will never game on a mac for as long as I live again.
Classic requires 2007 era graphics cards. Any new PC on the market is capable of running it. You’ll be fine with the 13" docked.
To be honest thou I would stay away from a Mac. Yes Mac’s are more powerful than what they use to be. But that can be said about all pc’s from back in the day. Mac’s are great for work and school with all the extras they come with. Laptops will do great for gaming. Have a MSI G72 for years with a 27inch screen plugged in. It did great no issues just not at max settings. Which I would go with if I was you. Alienware to me is an overpriced Dell imo. Also going PC I believe MS still gives away to students a lot of their extra software for free. And if not you can sub it for a year for pretty cheap.
If I were you, I would opt for the 15". You’ll be able to run the game just fine with an i7 processor, 16gb of ram, and 4gb dedicated video memory. I would also recommend that you pick up a cooling pad for your laptop as heat damage is a common problem with gaming laptops.
ive never heard of either of those graphics chipsets but a website called passmark has. just google the two names of the chipsets, see which one has a higher passmark score, and determine whether or not its worth it.
FWIW, in the past few years as game companies have adopted Metal (Apple’s DX12 equivalent), the gaming performance gap between macOS and Windows has evaporated. Assuming both are running on the same hardware, there’s no difference in framerate. I’ve seen this personally, with WoW running identically in macOS and Windows on my hackintosh (which runs both operating systems).
With modern Macs, any difference in performance boils down to differences in hardware, but even that’s become a moot point since you can now buy a full power desktop graphics card and use it with your MacBook by connecting it via Thunderbolt.
Is there any reason you would need higher specs than the lowest priced 13" Macbook Pro for work?
Have you considered or done a price comparison on what it would cost to buy the lowest priced 13" MBP + a Desktop (or some external GPU)?
I can run BFA on a MacBook Air. You don’t need a Pro.