Macbook review

[mFC_]

great review as always! :wub:

[acies]

for anyone interested I finally found reviews of gaming on a Macbook...

Guy said he was able to play Half-Life 2 at 1024x768 on High settings and manage about 20 fps, on medium-low settings he got over 30...

Also someone else posted on it that Warcraft III and Rise of Nations (which are the two games I'd play) worked great.

Here's the link

Click Me!

Thats pretty impressive. it must be the dual core and the ram that help it out alot.

[Dazzla Veteran]

It's a bit late now but I'll post my Half Life 2 benchmarks tomorrow night.

[Odyssey]

Thanks for the review! I'm enjoying mine at the moment. :D

[The Angry Bunny]

It's a bit late now but I'll post my Half Life 2 benchmarks tomorrow night.

That'd be great.

I'd take your opinion of it over theirs :yes:

[dL]

when Apple announce their 12.1" widescreen, 0.8" thin, 2.0GHz Merom, X1400 GPU with 160GB perpendicular HD I'll be first in line whatever the cost

When are they releasing that? From what source did you hear about this?

dL

[trek]

When are they releasing that? From what source did you hear about this?

dL

The word gullible isn't in the dictionary.

[morgs]

...from a windows owner... "so thats why people like mac's."

Loved the review, if only I had enough money

[hifive]

YAY! You posted on NBR and it's up! Everyone loves it, haha!

Also, your review pushed me to ordering the macbook tonight. :)

[Dazzla Veteran]

Hey guys, does anyone know of a host I could use to mirror? I got an email from Apple saying I'm close to my June data transfer limit and I'm about to be turned off. Ive used 10GB in the past 3 days and that's the whole months allowance.

The whole review is only 17mb including the videos (14mb of it) so if anyone could let me know of somewhere or help me out it'd be greatly appreciated.

Oh, also the admin from Notebook Review wants me to do an article on Parallels VS Boot Camp. Is there anything in particular that you would like to see in it?

[Lowdar]

Very good review, I am now definitely interested in purchasing a MacBook before school restarts in September. I have plenty of space to offer you for your videos and any other stuff you might need to host, check your PMs.

[Huy]

@dL he just made that up. Pure speculation/rumors (or a dream...).

[dL]

Do more about the limitations to using Windows XP on MacBooks. I'm pretty sure there are some things that do not run as well. I heard from Liquid that playing .wmv files tend to be quite slow.

On a side note, can Mac OS X run real media files (.rmv or .rmvb)?

I still don't understand why there are still people buying the MacBook when it is so friggin hot in temperature. I mean, that doesn't seem to be normal when your hand feels uncomfortable touching it at around 83 degrees.

dL

[Dazzla Veteran]

Thanks for all the offers of hosting, they really are greatly appreciated. For the time being the Notebookreview.com videos are all hosted at youtube, that'll help massively. For Neowin I've put them on my ISP webspace and hopefully that's enough.

I'm gonna try and get the Half Life 2 done tonight but I'm pretty busy with real life work with 13-14 hour days so it might have to wait until the weekend when I do my Parallels VS Boot Camp article.

I'll go into more depth dL, is there anything in specific apart from what you mentioned that you want me to look at?

Also, as posted on the review it idles at around 40-50 C with the whole laptop warm to touch, as far as I can remember that also includes Windows usage as well, but I'll confirm that in my VS article.

Things I'm going to touch on:

Gaming on both (e.g. is 2D gaming possible on Parallels?)

GUI responsiveness between the two with a video comparison

Boot up times comparison

Benchmark comparison (e.g. PC mark)

Detailed breakdown of what's broken in Windows XP in each solution

Setup how-to's for both (if people want that)

Virtue desktops setup how to with Parallels (the cube switching animation)

Alternative OS performance on Parallels (Ubuntu 6.06)

[Lowdar]

Do you have the television adaptor for the MacBook? If so would you possibly be able to review the quality of the MacBook when linked with a television? I would be very grateful.

[Dazzla Veteran]

I've bought it from the Apple store today so hopefully I'll have it by the end of the week :)

Edit, it's actually the VGA adapter because it'll be connected to my TV via VGA running at 1360*768 so it's less a TV adaptor and more a second monitor.

Edited June 6, 2006 by Dazzla

[The Angry Bunny]

Heh... bet you never expected your review to go this far.

I'm having the toughest time ever deciding which to get between a base macbook or a base macbook pro. (I'd upgrade later) I'll read a review on one and love it, and then I'll read a review on another one and love it.

Price wise I'm leaning toward the macbook, but futureproof wise I'm leaning toward the macbook pro...

Ahh decisions decisions... lol

(And this will be my first mac)

[Lowdar]

Thanks for informing me, my mistake. Can't wait to see what comes next, this will be the deciding factor on whether or not I will be purchasing a MacBook.

[Dom]

By far your best review, loved it, and damn i want one!

[AndrewNP]

Ah, that picture's about 2 years old. I've lost over 100 lbs since then :huh:

I contacted Notebookreview.com about putting the review up and everything's sorted, it should be going up on Tuesday :D thanks to Squibbles for suggesting it.

congratulations on the 100lb loss bro, thats alot to work off.

post before&after?

yayyyy for the review being posted on a known notebook site: )

[Wannes]

Well Dazzla, as I've said a page before :: Great review! Just letting you know that you made me buy this. Bye bye Windows PC, Hello Macbook.

Just one question: As my son may use this MacBook when I'm not around, would it be possible for him to make C# program's in it. Now he's using Visual Studio (I think) but I suppose this won't work on the macbook...

[Lowdar]

If he can code in pascal than he will be able to use the Mac OS X side of the MacBook to code things, although if needed you could always install Windows XP next to it.

[The Angry Bunny]

Well once again I needed a little more proof about macbook gaming (keep in mind I don't want to play anything huge on it... just some RTS's like Age of Empires, Rise of Nations, and Warcraft III) and found it, this time in the form of a video.

This guy manages to play Doom 3 on his macbook. His specs were 2.0 ghz white, 2 gigs of ram, and he played it at 640x480 settings on low, and managed to get decent framrate by the look of it.

This officially answers it for me... macbook all the way

[Dazzla Veteran]

I've got some results for Half Life 2 and it's extremely favourable. I'm currently writing a Boot Camp VS Parallels article and I've included videos of it playing at 1024*768 and 1280*800, I've got benchmarks and impressions of HL2 on the Macbook as well. Hopefully it'll be up early in the week.

[sn00pie]

Looking forward to reading it Dazzla. (Y)