Half-Life 2 on a Macbook Pro

Hello all,

This is my first post on this forum and enjoyed reading the threads.

I just ordered a Macbook Pro 1.86 GHZ - 1 Gig RAM and the rest is the same. I spent all my hard earned money for this Notebook. I only have 1 concern.

I read and understood everything about Boot Camp and installing Windows, so thats taken care of. I am a serious gamer. I play Half-Life 2 and all the other Steam games on a daily basis and was hoping this notebook would run those games, and would actually look good on my Macbook Pro. I right now have a Dell Dimension 8300 Desktop 3 GHZ with 1 Gig Ram and a ATI Radeon X700 Pro 256MB installed. The Dell with X700 runs awesome but would the Radeon X1600 on the Macbook Pro be close to or better than the X700 Pro? Overall, excluding the Macbook's portability, would the Macbook Pro provide better speeds and graphics than my Dell desktop? I'm getting the Macbook Pro this Friday so i'm really excited because this is my first Mac. I hope this Mac would be worth the money.

Thank You

I think it would run fine. There are people running HL2 on Mac Minis. The X1600 is actually underclocked, so its more like an X1300, but I think you would have nothing to worry about.

So would the Macbook Pro I bought be better or worse than the Dell?

Well, saying its like an x1300 might be overstating the issue. It will run a little slower than your x700 probably. Macs are not gaming machines, even with Windows.

I have a MacBook Pro with 1gig of ram and with windows through boot camp I run half life 2 just fine at 1440x900 with the setting set to high. And it's even installed on an external hard drive to save space. the external increases the loading times somewhat but while playing it's perfectly smooth.

avcabob said:

I have a MacBook Pro with 1gig of ram and with windows through boot camp I run half life 2 just fine at 1440x900 with the setting set to high. And it's even installed on an external hard drive to save space. the external increases the loading times somewhat but while playing it's perfectly smooth.

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Do you guys have the MBP with 128MB or 256MB graphic cards? I am still debating on whether it is worth it to spend much more for 256MB graphic card.

I have the 128mb graphics card, and while I can see certain games benefitting from the extra vram (Oblivia for example), I really don't find myself regreting not upgrading to the 256. Games I play regularly by the way are: World of Warcraft, Age of Empires 3, Oblivian, and I dabble with other games as I get bored the 3 previously mentioned.

it will not be as good as the x700 but provided that valve releases a patch that would make the game support dual core processors, you'll be nice on

I have the 256MB video card. Playing games was the main reason I went with it over the 128.

I'm gonna get around to installing XP to do the exact same thing. (play HL2)

Thanks for the posts guys. I just got new Macbook Pro on Thursday. Man this machine is amazing. I just installed windows and currently im installing Half Life 2. So far, it looks to be working pretty well. Your posts helped me a lot.

Thanks