Game Play on a MBP 13 2011

Last year my college student son said he wanted an MBP for school as all the 'cool' students used one. I said "fine, but just remember that the MBP just doesn't do games all that well".

Now he says that he regretted getting the MBP because it won't play Mass Effect 3. So he's bugging me for a new PC gaming laptop.

Would Bootcamp and Win7 allow his current 2011 13 inch MBP (2.3 ghz i5 with the standard Intel HD Graphics 3000) to run this game at a reasonable level of performance? I'm not a gamer at all so I'm not much of a judge of the hardware aspects of what constitutes 'adequate' performance.

Thanks......and apologies ahead of time if this topic has been beaten to death already.

Here are the System Requirements for Mass Effect 3 in Windows: LINK

Don't go by the minimum requirements, use the recommended requirements instead. And looking at them, your son's MBP may be able to play the game but at a very low frame rate. The HD 3000 GPU does OK for some games, but for others which demand more (like Mass Effect 3) it doesn't perform very well at all.

Yeah, I'd have to agree with Chscag here. The HD3000 is OK, it's just not a gaming GPU and really won't perform terribly well. For higher end gaming, if sticking with a laptop you're going to want something more geared for gaming. Even the GT650m (which is a very nice GPU and I use it on my 2012 MBP to play many games) isn't strong enough to keep up high framerates unless you reduce resolution and/or settings from the default.

The closest compromise if you really want to have a single machine to do both OSX and bootcamp would and be a laptop would have to be the 15" MBP. If he wants to switch to a pure gaming laptop then you can either go cheap like Asus (less expensive, but still makes some nice gaming laptops), medium like Alienware (just not thrilled with dell who own's AW) / MSI or higher end like Sager or Origin

thanks

Thanks for the replies on the gaming question. I would love for there to have been a workaround, as I know that once he starts school in a couple of weeks he'll be wishing he had kept his MBP. (we ended up buying a Samsung Series 7).

There's at least one silver lining, I get to keep his 13 inch MBP as a second, slightly more portable laptop