I took my gaming PC into the shop (again) this weekend. It looks like this time they’re going to replace the motherboard. Lord knows they’ve replaced almost everything else in it, without getting to a stable point. Who knows, this may work.
In the mean time, I was down to “just” my PowerMac to play with and, you see, I’ve become used to watching television on one computer while playing games on the other. What to do… Ah, right, my laptop!
I shoved the MacBook Pro under my desk (on top of a laptop cooler), plugged in all of the stuff that was connected to my gaming PC, and sure enough, I was back to two useful computers.
Now having the PowerMac and the MBP side-by-side, both connected to 1280×1024 monitors led me to wonder which one was the better WoW machine. You guessed it, the MBP was significantly faster, even with the detail settings in the game set much higher. It was eminently playable, actually, with a solid 30fps everywhere I went.
Of course, the gaming PC gets three times that framerate (when it’s working), but it’s nice to know that I can still get a good experience when I’m travelling (or the next time my PC fails).
I briefly considered installing BootCamp to see if the PC version of WoW would perform better (and so that I could get some Everquest 2 playing in :-)). Unfortunately, the 100Gig drive in my laptop was already 78Gig full, which was too much for BootCamp. If it wasn’t a company machine, I’d replace the drive with one of the new perpendicular recording 200Gig ones. That way I could set up a 60Gig partition on the PC and still have more space than I have now. Next time.
Update: Sorry to all who saw the bogus, half-complete version of this article, which I accidentally posted earlier. It’s gone now. 😛