Is Mac Mini able to run Left 4 Dead well?

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Is Mac Mini able to run Left 4 Dead well?

I'm considering getting a Mac Mini, which will be my first Mac computer, besides that one that's black and white and had the really fun painting application, beside the point though, looking to get a Mac Mini

I was going to get the less expensive of the two "basic" models and upgrade the RAM to 2 or 4 gigs, but a major concern for me is if it will be able to run a game like Left 4 Dead, or other games with similar requirements, I don't know why, but it seems to me the name just sounds like it's not very powerful... I went over the specs, but I don't know what's good anymore, especially not with video cards, last video card I had was a ATI 500 something or other, since then I've had the misfortune of working with laptops, and have never used a NVIDIA card before so don't know much about thier numbering scheme..

Anyway, sorry for the long winded post, I have a horrible tendency to do such things

edit just occured to me, this is in the wrong place, *wanders off to figure out where it needs to go*

Ok, new question, where the heck are the regular just... forum-y forums?
Message was edited by: Valalvax

Posted on Mar 31, 2009 7:43 AM

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Answer 1

Tim Haigh

Level 7

24,198 points

Mar 31, 2009 9:20 AM in response to Valalvax

edit just occured to me, this is in the wrong place, wanders off to figure out where it needs to go

Your question relates to the mac mini and your are in the mac mini 2009 section so you are in the right place.

The new nvidia integrated graphics chip offers significant improvements over the previous intel gma graphics chip. That being said I would not consider the mac mini as a serious gaming machine but it will play 3D games way better than before and would suit the avg player.

Macworld published some benchmarks and you can see the results for some of the games they tested.

http://www.macworld.com/article/139267/2009/03/macmini2009.html?t=109

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Answer 2

Valalvax Author

Level 1

0 points

Mar 31, 2009 10:02 AM in response to Tim Haigh

Yea, but I didn't think it was much of a "support" issue, ya know?

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Answer 3

jogiba

Level 1

73 points

Apr 1, 2009 2:12 PM in response to Valalvax

Get the 2.26GHz with 4GB DDR3 RAM and you will not have a problem .

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Answer 4

Jun 14, 2009 4:40 PM in response to Valalvax

It's able to run this game well enough IMO since I have steam and HL2 along with Left4Dead,etc installed on my macmini bootcamp partition.
Make sure you have 2GB installed though to get the full 256MB ram for videocard.
Newer shader intensive games like Cryostasis or Crysis you will have to turn down the resolution from 1920x1200 to get a playable framerate though.

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Answer 5

msavwah

Level 1

10 points

Jun 18, 2009 12:22 PM in response to davi angel

not so lucky for me on my old mini 😟

I'm running steam via crossover games and have to use the lowest possible settings just to avoid crashing/hanging etc.

I kinda want the new mini.....

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Answer 6

Valalvax Author

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Jun 18, 2009 5:42 PM in response to msavwah

Wow, I'm so surprised that this is still on the front page AND has over a thousand views...

I suppose I'll give an update, considering I'm here..

I got the cheaper model, and it ran WoW well enough, 60 FPS in dead areas, 20 in Dalaran, unfortunately after a few addons/if I had ANYTHING running in the background, stuttering was very bad

As for L4D, there are times when I can tell it's having issues, but I was honestly having more problems with my internet connection not being up to snuff than the machine.

Last week I bought 4 gigs of ram, and upgraded it, I can now say that my mac mini is probably the ugliest Mac product ever, the bottom side of it has over a hundred scratches, leftover putty, and I'm pretty sure I messed up some of the pins (though, that could just be my imagination), if you can't handle a single scratch on your mini, I'd def get the pros to upgrade your ram

On the inside, the mini is really fantastic, the way they put all that in there, just amazing, pictures really don't do it justice, will say though, foam is magic for the small formfactor machines apparently, there was quite a bit of foam doing things such as reducing noise, vibration, and directing air flow. And those snap off connectors were awesome, I accidentally got the Airport's wire wrapped around something, and when I pulled the top part off, it actually pulled out, which led to several seconds of "omigawd what did I just do?!" then realizing it just pops back

I'm sorry, I just.... went off on a tangent there, but, haven't gotten a chance to try L4D yet, but now I get 60 FPS in Dalaran full of people, 30 FPS recording, but I that's what I capped it at, and this was in/around Dalaran as well, view distance 50%, Environment detail 100%, and I can listen to iTunes on the Mac Mini's speakers now, working slowly on upgrades for it, unfortunately due to various tech things dying on me it's slow going

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Answer 7

Jun 23, 2009 9:02 AM in response to Valalvax

I just got my mini this weekend and had my roomate log into his steam account. this is on vista 64 with 4 gigs of ram.

loaded up left for dead, and played in 720 resolution on my 42" 1080 panel and it played very well. I only did single player for about 10 minutes but there wasn't really any slow down and still looked fairly pretty at that rez.

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