Macbook Air 11" (Mid 2012) Gaming Experience

I thought I would post this as, with the advent of ultra books, there seems to be more and more people looking for thin and light laptops that can play casual games. The MBA seems to come up a lot as it posts pretty high 3dmark scores in bootcamp for an HD4000 machine (5000+ in 3dmark 06).

I owned a Rev B MBA a few years ago but sold it because it had a propensity to set on fire while gaming in bootcamp . I was interested to find out if this years MBA has improved in terms of thermal management in bootcamp. I am shortly taking delivery of a ux32vd but I recently had the opportunity to pick up a base version MBA 11 for £600 so I thought I'd give it a try. Below are my personal experiences of gaming under bootcamp.

For the OS I used the 90 day windows 8 enterprise evaluation.

After a standard install via bootcamp using a usb stick and the latest bootcamp drivers, my first impression was that the bootcamp drivers have hardly been improved since my last mac in 2009. The touchpad scrolling is laggy and devoid of most of the multi touch gestures. Fortunately there is now a piece of third party software called trackpad++ which makes the touchpad a lot smoother and adds in a few handy 3 and 4 finger gestures for windows 8.

With steam installed I downloaded Dirt 2 and a copy of RealTemp to check the temps and clock speed when gaming.

As expected the i5 clocks up to 2.5Ghz but within 30 seconds the temps were over 100 degrees C. After trying some other stress tests it is obvious the fan speed is severely limited under bootcamp. Installing MacFan0.65 confirmed a max fan RPM in windows of 3900.

I then used MacFan's manual override to take the fan speed to 6500rpm (max permissible). Dirt 2 now runs with the temps constantly hovering around the 100c mark, worryingly close to the 105c max temp of the CPU. I got at least 30mins sustained gaming without any further rise in temps. FPS was excellent with 50-60 average at medium settings and native res.

Next I tried CSGO. To my surprise with the fan speed at max, the temps were much lower, never going far above 90c even after an hour of gaming. At low-med settings and native res FPS never dropped below 60fps. This is really solid performance and I was able to play a full competitive match to a similar standard as I would on a desktop (ping was a bit jumpy on wifi).

Finally Resident Evil 5, another games for windows live title of a similar vintage to dirt2. This time temps were high but acceptable, averaging high 90s. I then hooked the MBA up to a 42" TV with a 360 control connected and closed the lid. After 45mins playing online the temps were getting above 100c again.

In summary I was pretty blown away with the performance in windows 8 bootcamp. As long as you are not a graphics and are content to play on low-medium settings and no res above 1366x768, competitive frame rates are easily achievable (60+fps) in most games. Despite this I find the temps rather worryingly close to the i5's maximum operating temp of 105c. Will the fans life be shortened by running at 6500rpm for long periods when apple limited it to <4000? I also noticed quite a disparity between temps for the two cores. Core 1 was consistently 3-5 degrees hotter than core 2, indicating that perhaps apples application of thermal compound is not quite up to scratch. If this was going to be my long term laptop I would probably have the bottom cover off and reapply some higher quality compound.

For normal usage, other than gaming, the mba lived up to my expectations in every regard both in osx and win8. It is very small and light, lightning fast, ~5hour battery (probably only 3.5h in windows), nice screen, excellent keyboard and trackpad and awesome expansion possibilities with thunderbolts and 2x USB3.0.

 

Can you try CSGO STEAM Mac version and not bootcamp to see if it is playable?

 

For kicks, I ran Origin and installed BF3 to see how it plays.
64 Player server(Karkland), everything set on low AA off.
15-29 usually will hover around the mid 20s. Explosions dip to around 15.
13" Macbook Air: i7/8GB ram. That's the heaviest gaming I can just about get on BF3.
The HD4000 did better then i thought it would.
Temps inside hit 107C on the cpu.

 

Colpolite, I just tried CSGO on Mac and it is nowhere near as smooth as windows. I think OSX throttles the CPU clock speed instead of increasing fan speed to compensate for the heat. Even on lowest settings after about 5 minutes the frame rates were dropping below 30 and averaging 30-40.

I don't have a good bit of fan control software for mac so I couldn't check the fan speed but I would bet from the sound of it, it isn't getting anywhere near 6500RPM, which obviously I can do on Windows using MacFan as I said above.

AnimalMother Did you check the fan speed using MacFan? I would be careful as the CPU is rated at 105C Max according to Intel. Shame BF3 isn't really playable but I guess it would be better on a smaller server. What resolution were you playing at?

 

I was playing on the max, 1440 x 900 and 1366 x 768. It was actually pretty playable on maps like Metro as well as lower player servers.
As it got hotter, thought it became apparent. My finger tips started to feel the real heat as I stopped tracking the temps on HWInfo lol and I stopped playing once it hit 105C but the recorded highest temp was 107C. I probably didn't notice it get that high because I was deep into messing with the settings to make it playable.

It was just for kicks so I didn't actually use anything to adjust the fan. I honestly didn't expect it to get that hot so fast.
I'll finish by saying it is as actually very playable. Maybe it will fare allot better with MacFan but I have not tried it. If I get BF3 on it again I'll let you know.

 

Just a note, that you can use SMCfancontrol to do the fans as well, I am not quite sure what the maximum is but its a pretty lightweight app, it just stays on the top by the battery icon, can get it to read out fan speeds and set fan speeds as well.

 

When you turn the fan control back to it's default setting do you have any problems with it not going back to default? I do, I have to restart my air to prevent the fan from continuing to run full RPM.

Macbook Air 11 mid 2012
128GB SSD
i7
8GB

It seems that my 13" i5/8gb/128gb ssd runs the game just as fast. In fact, my i7 crashes games and freezes up on both steams (Day of Defeat, Half Life 2 Deathmatch and Team Fortress 2. My 11 air crash/freezes on Windows steam and macs steam with the same games. It just gets too hot and feels like it can't handle the heat even as the steam starts the game, that fast.

My 13" ran it much better, slightly cooler, rarely froze or crashed. The 11 air I had before ran BF3 on the lowest settings never crashed or froze. I am thinking it maybe I have a fault in my hardware or so.. will take it in to be sure but that's my gaming report.

All the games were run on the max settings. 2 Macbook Air 11 and a 13 macbook air. All run the same games and bought this year. All run it differently. The other macbook air 11 runs games perfectly and even better then the 13". My own macbook air 11 does not.

The frame rates were great, very playable 40s maxed graphics settings online 32 player full servers each game ran excellent. The air got hot. My personal air gets really hot and will crash. My GFs will not crash or overheat.... very odd...

 

I think it just sets the minimum speed for your fan so if its too hot and you go back to default it will still stay at higher rpm. Its good for when it does get a bit too hot on your lap or you want to run it slightly cooler. Usually a restart will fix it, although I think a shut down is sometimes required as I used to (on the previous gen macbook) have to boot into osx to set the fan for windows boot camp via a restart.