More Awesome Than You!

Hi, I'm thinking of getting a 15" Macbook pro, I've never been a Mac user, this would be me crossing over to new territories. Before I go ahead, I was wondering how TS3 with all the EPs and SPs will perform, whether running the game will be slow or playing the game with all the graphics on high will effect the speed and overheat the graphic card?

This is the Macbook pro specifications:
15-inch 2.4ghz
intel core i5
4gb memory
320gb hd
intel hd graphics
nvidia geforce gt330m with 256mb
mac os x snow leopard

Can anyone help me?

Don't buy a Mac. 

Consider yourself helped.

It will run like dogshit and custom hairs won't work most of the time.

However, you can create a Windows partition on it and run it with bootcamp and TS3 will run smooth like butter.

Crappy Apple butter.  >:(

I play pudding on my 2 year old 13" MacBook pro. It suffers from annoying pauses and a lack of cc hair, but this hasn't been enough to make me start using Bootcamp. Oh and I have my settings quite low.

Are you primarily a gamer? Because if so, stick to PC is my advice. If however you just want to play the pudding every so often and maybe a couple of other games (Dragon Age for instance plays absolutely fine on Mac) then I do recommend going Mac. I don't want to sound like some kind of rabid fangirl, because I am really not, but buying that MacBook Pro was the best computing decision I ever made. It's fast, easy to use, rarely has any problems, is light and portable, converted me to trackpad use, etc etc. jeromy will be foaming at the mouth right about now.

ALSO, you can sit in a coffee shop, listening to Chase and Status while you pretend to write your novel. Just be careful not to drop the mac when you're riding your fixie.

*foams at mouth*

Yes, and it's also $500 overpriced, a pain in the ass to game on, and prone to overheating.  Also, I see no way in which Windows isn't "easy to use".

(http://i.imgur.com/heHEv.jpg)

Let's see, I previously owned an HP Pavillion, which a)overheated like you could not imagine, and B)was about as portable as a t-Rex. Seriously, the overheating was a sight to see. It Heated our whole flat for a year, unti it finally gave up. Yes, it games, but aside from that it was no where near as good as my Mac, which cost like £750 to its £650.

Hur, yes! My PC laptop also overheated like crazy. I never even tried to play games on it. Actually, it never got so far as to displaying any signs of overheating except the fan would always be on max. The fan speeded up for graphic-heavy websites, even. I once brought it to an office where I worked, and when I went to lunch the others went looking for THAT AWFUL SOUND. My MBP at least lets me hear my own thoughts.

Protip, though: don't play on a laptop you want to keep. They are not made for moving heat. Games go on desktops!

You were saying?
(http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/5797/laptopbrands.jpg)

Just because Apple has only one type of laptop, doesn't mean Windows laptops follow the same formula. There are good and bad brands, and HP happens to be one of the worst.

Laptops aren't meant for gaming anyways.

Yes, I am fully aware of that. I was talking FROM MY EXPERIENCE. Did I say Macs are better than PC's? No, I did not. Did I say all PC laptops suck? No, I did not.

Did I say you said any of that?

TS3 managed to swell the battery in mine to almost exploding point and wore the fan out, and that was with an FPS limiter and minimum graphics settings.  It's hell if you play it on OSX because the game runs in a Windows emulator which makes it even worse.  Even with a Windows partition I found it still laggy and the fan was always running at max.  There are tools you can download to control the fan in Windows but with TS3 you don't wanna do that or it'll fry your laptop.  So unless you wanna keep shelling out for a new laptop fan and battery (unibody fans are hellishly expensive although you can buy cheap knockoff £15 ones from China instead of Apple's own £50 ones, the batteries however you don't wanna risk getting a cheap knockoff one as they're known to explode and the proper ones cost like hundreds of pounds that you might aswell just buy a new laptop if you can't do without a battery) just don't bother running it on a Macbook Pro.  Get a proper gaming PC with some good hardware and you can at least run the graphics at max and not have it look like crap and run like crap, and if it does cause the fan to blow at least you can replace them for £5.

What soozelwoozel said; I've got a MacBook Pro and it works great for my daily life (internet, homework, messing around) and I've actually never had any overheating problems. However, Macs in general don't seem to be the best for gaming, at least not as laptops, so it all depends on what your "daily life" is.

I will say that leaving Dell for Apple was one of the best decisions I ever made. I cannot caution you enough against getting a Dell, at least not the non-gaming ones (I have no experience with the gaming laptops). If you're considering other brands, my sister seems to like her Toshiba Satellite; I know she can play TS3 on it and it seems to run okay.

Edited to say I have no idea what the issues about CC hairs are, because my MacBook Pro handles them just fine.

I also switched from a Dell to a Macbook Pro, and I have to say everyday life wise it was the best decision I ever made. However, most of what I do is film editing and digital art, which Macs seem to be geared towards. I don't game on a regular basis, and Sims 3 is the only game I play. (No WoW, etc.) I've played Sims 3 on my Macbook for extended periods of time, generally on roadtrips, and it drains the battery pretty fast. However, I've found that using NRaas No Intro and No CD have stopped my machine from overheating when running the Sims 3. I currently have LN & Ambitions installed with no stuff packs.

Here are my specs:

I am on a 13" Macbook Pro running OS X 10.6.6 with a 500 GB HD
  Processor Name:   Intel Core 2 Duo
  Processor Speed:   2.4 GHz
  Memory:   4 GB
  Chipset Model:   NVIDIA GeForce 320M

Hope that helps you out. Happy gaming. --Roo
edit: I forgot to mention, I don't run my game graphics on high. It drains the battery and heats my system up pretty quickly. Medium works just fine though. Also be aware that programming can kind of be a pain in the ass on OS X.

Go find the local Apple dealer and talk to them.  I did that before I built my latest PC and bought my Toshiba laptop.  Apart from gaming, I do alot of photo editing and was interested in the Macbook for when I travel, and would have considered and Apple desktop instead of Windows.  After talking to the Apple sales guy, it only took approx. 2 minutes for me to decide not to go Apple and stay with Windows, for either system.  Then I built a high end PC which handles photo editing as good as any Apple machine would, and is way superior for gaming, and went with a Toshiba laptop, which performs what I want it to do quite well for what it is, and lets me play some game when traveling.  As money was limited for the laptop it doesn't have the higher speed CPU that I would prefer, so things are a touch slower, but perfectly acceptable and no heating problems.

This is an extremely misleading picture. It is important to firstly, identify how long the WARRANTY is, and secondly, the CAUSES of the failures. I would rather buy a computer that has a 100% chance of failing during the warranty period than a computer which will most likely fail shortly AFTER the warranty. Additionally, CAUSE of the failure is important. A motherboard/chipset/CPU failure is merely mildly annoying, as long as they occur within warranty. Make sure they do, even if you have to abuse it harder. Hard drive failures are very bad, but also preventable by identifying the brand of the hard drives they install and replacing them. It is important to identify how time-to-failure correlates with the warranty period, so you can subject the laptop to the correct amount of abuse to ensure failure within that period. Remember: All laptops die. What matters is how likely you can kill it within the warranty period. Malfunction rates are irrelevant: What MATTERS is the quality of warranty replacement and how much you have to do to kill it within that period.

Maybe if I post the article it would make more sense. (http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/11/17/reliability.study.has.apple.4th.place/)

I don't write internet statistics, and don't expect them to be 100% accurate, seems like a fairly in-depth study though.

Pescado isn't confused by the graph, he just wants a different one.

I meant that I posted the image out of context.

I can't go back and time and post something else, nor do I really care. My only point was that HP sucks, which is backed up by various customer anecdotes on the web; I'm not interested in arguing the specifics.

You probably picked the wrong board to post that in, then.