I used Boot Camp to make a little partition to dual boot into Windows XP SP3 on my MacBook Pro… and seeing how I have an nVidia 8600M video card with 256MB of dedicated memory in this little notebook, I thought I’d try out Day of Defeat: Source (I’m a semi-regular on a server there).

It was great (other than I didn’t have any sound). I was getting a regular 60-80fps. But it wasn’t long (1 minute?) before I heard the fans starting to spin up (apparently I’ve never had them go full speed before) and I could feel the heat through the keyboard.

So I lifted the MacBook up to feel the bottom which was now HOT. Easily 3 or 4 times hotter than it is under normal operating.

I quickly exited the game and the fans calmed down within a minute or two. And while it may work well for gaming… it doesn’t work well for gaming. There’s no way that much heat can be good for it. So while the power is there if I need it (video editing, photoshop, etc); it’s not there for gaming.  I don’t even want to imagine the toll playing a game like that would take on the battery if I weren’t plugged in.

Anyone else have a different experience or opinion?