I’m looking to buy a Macbook (in addition to my main gaming PC) for personal use, as my girlfriend and I would both make good use of the system for media on the move.
I was wondering if the following upgrades would make much of a difference to the performance of the laptop, when running WoW on setting 7 or thereabouts:
CPU:
2.3GHz 8-core 9th-generation Intel Core i9 processor, Turbo Boost up to 4.8GHz vs Turbo Boost up to 5.0GHz (+£200)
Memory:
16GB 2666MHz DDR4 vs 32GB 2666MHz DDR4 (+£400) vs 64GB (+£800)
Graphics:
AMD Radeon Pro 5500M with 4GB vs 8GB GDDDR6 memory (+£100) vs 5600M 8GB (+£700)
I was thinking of doing the CPU upgrade and the first of the memory/graphics upgrades. Do you think these would be worthwhile and am I right in thinking any further upgrades would be unnecessary?
If you really want to pay the ungodly prices they charge, go for it.
16GB RAM is more than enough & you’ll get zero benefit from any higher amount (let alone at THOSE premiums).
Radeon Pro 5500M is a ‘work’ GPU; not very well optimised for gaming at all, IIRC.
Base CPU will be more than enough.
A bigger issue for playing WoW on any machine they make will be thermal throttling; laptops are synonymous with being bad when it comes to cooling.
Unless you’re in that ecosystem already, I’d go for a Windows machine of a similar value/price & you’ll get a significantly more capable machine for WoW & media streaming.
Yeah I hear you on the pricing. It’s kind of a compromise with the other half, as she’s not a fan of Windows systems and it’s really only a secondary system for me. Also worth noting you seem to be able to pay over 24 months with 0% interest so that part is also quite important right now.
I also usually find the display to be better on Macbooks than comparable Windows, but I may just not be looking in the right places…
Okay so you think that the 2.3 CPU is fine and 16GB RAM is fine but the graphics are worth upgrading? I know it won’t be optimal in any case for WoW but as long as it can play at 6 or 7 with consistent 50-60 fps I think I’d be happy enough with it.
While premium for the extra RAM is pretty big remember that Macbooks can’t be expanded after so you are stuck with the 16 GB for life of the machine. It might be preferrable to get 32 GB for future proofing though it depends on exactly your use cases and if you are like me who tends to leave all kinds of programs running on the background and do other stuff while playing games.
And extra RAM is not never really wasted entirely: operating system uses any extra memory for a disk cache and RAM is still much much faster than even the fastest SSD.