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THE MAC
So as my mid-2012 classic MacBook Pro hit its 10th birthday last year and it was really becoming untenable to do current day work on any longer, having been EoLed for MacOS updates by Apple two OS versions ago, and the day had long passed when the 1GB GeForce GT 650M GPU was usable for anything I wanted to play under Windows, I decided to satisfy both wants of a more modern and powerful Mac as well as a powerful on-the-go gaming setup in one device. Obviously the second half of that negated the new ARM Macs as my priority for gaming is software I'd play on my PC, not my iPad mini, so I tracked down one of the mid-2020 9980HK/Radeon Pro 5600M MacBook Pros. I found one that fit the bill of what I wanted last fall, migrated to it, and resold my original cMBP. Iridium, my second-longest-serving Mac ever (behind only Cypher, my 2005 PowerMac G5 Quad which is still in service), went off to a new owner in New York, and Tungsten has taken its place.
I've been mostly working on it lately and doing a little bit of occasional Mac gaming, from a selection of what scant few single digits of Mac games I have left that survived the 32-bit apocalypse. I hadn't delved into BootCamp much beyond setting it up though until very recently.
Since I've been massively out of the loop for years now and need to get back up to speed on Mac Bootcamp gaming, I thought I'd do something of a brief log of what I run into as I get set up, as well as pointing out products I've tried that are working well, etc.
As fate would have it my place suffered major roof damage during a heavy hailstorm which is currently being replaced along with siding that got smashed by flying debris (it was a hell of a storm), I can't use my home office much and have been relegated to only using my secondary setup in my study while the place is being torn apart and repaired pretty much all day every day for the past 8 days with an estimated 20 to go. The limitations of my setup quickly became apparent. My mouse was ancient and not supported by modern software alongside being slow, my original Apple Thunderbolt Display had a horrifying amount of input lag compared to my modern office monitors, I didn't have enough USB ports nor any way to plug in SD cards and optical media since the built-ins on my 2012 MBP were replaced by only four Thunderbolt ports on the 2020 one, etc. Past due for an overhaul to bring my setup out of the early 2010s.
Modernization time!
THE MONITOR
I've really enjoyed the hell out of my Dell AW3423DW QD-OLED ultrawide on my PC. That is the happiest I have been with a monitor since my 2002 Sony FW900. I never liked LCD what with its input lag, pixel persistence, ghosting, gray blacks, being stuck on 60 Hz for like a decade when CRT was doing 96 Hz in 2002, etc. and resisted adopting it for the longest time, nursing my FW900 along until I finally switched to LCD in 2019 out of necessity. Intel and AMD had long since killed RAMDACs on their cards but NVIDIA was still holding out and had a RAMDAC with analog output via DVI-I on every card up until they went from Maxwell to Pascal and analog output was finished. I had a generally unsatisfying time with LCD from 2019-2022 and constantly kept tabs on the state of OLED, hoping someone would say "that's enough TVs, let's make a monitor." When Dell did exactly that in 2022 and made it a 21:9 which I'd already fallen in love with, well, to borrow a turn of phrase from tBC the pre-order money flew out of my account so fast I imploded a window in my bank. Long story short I was one of the second wave they shipped out I think around end of April 2022 and I've loved it ever since the day I received it. So, with that in mind, I noticed they updated the line with a $300 cheaper AMD FreeSync Premium Pro AW3423DWF (the DW is NVIDIA G-Sync Ultimate). Since my Mac is equipped with an AMD Radeon Pro 5600M which fully supports FreeSync including the top end Premium Pro version of the technology, it made sense to go with the FreeSync variant for my Mac.
THUNDERBOLT
Well! I love the monitor, but then I ran into another problem. I discovered not all Thunderbolt outputs are made equally. Even though technically FreeSync should work fine through a Thunderbolt dock, it did not work through the hardware I had. Not on Mac, not on Windows either. Time to find a Thunderbolt dock that had all the connectivity I needed along with its DisplayPort output being fully modernized and thus able to handle 165 Hz 3440x1440 HDR with FPP on my new monitor as well as 240 Hz FPP on my 27" in my home office. Per reviews I read, OWC's Thunderbolt Pro Dock had everything I wanted along with the unexpected bonus of supporting 10G ethernet without needing any extra add-on cards, which I have my home wired up for. A bit pricey but they were still running a New Year's sale on all their Thunderbolt docks which could also be combined with a coupon I had. Add all that together and it brought the price down about $110 and made it a little more palatable, so I picked one up.
Everything all came in at once over the past few days, and yesterday I got everything wired up and it works awesomely.
Although I am tapped out on my budget for upgrading my study workspace, I'll put in a recommendation here for Pioneer's BDR-XS07UHD slot-load Blu-ray drive which I have in my Thunderbolt stack up in my office. It's completely plug and play over USB-C with MacOS, Windows 10, and Windows 11. If you need or want to do anything to do with optical media on your Mac, that drive will do it and do it well and without headaches. Eventually I'll add one for downstairs too.
RUNNING WINDOWS
With MacOS squared away, it was time to get Windows going. First I discovered that I can't use Windows 11 on any Macs because it requires a CPU with TPM 2.0 support and while the 9980HK fits that bill, it's not recognized as such through the Mac's UEFI, and Apple's T2 security chip does not qualify either. There are ways to bypass that but apparently they involve bypasses that will likely break regularly with Windows updates as well as software that expects to see a TPM when running under Windows 11. I'm not interested in trying to troubleshoot that and want the experience to be as painless as possible, so I just went ahead and installed the latest version of Windows 10. It's disappointing considering all the under-the-hood improvements geared specifically toward improving gaming performance of Windows that Microsoft did for Windows 11, but it is what it is.
Once I was up and running under Windows and got Apple's Bootcamp software installed and fully updated, I made the discovery that not only is performance poor with the Radeon enterprise drivers that come with Bootcamp, but they can't be updated as AMD's software does not see or recognize the 5600M through the Mac's UEFI. Here we go again. Thankfully after lots of web searching, I discovered the existence of BootCampDrivers.com: Mac gaming enthusiasts who do their own custom-brewed AMD enterprise and gaming drivers for bootcamped Macs! Apparently there's some kind of problem they've encountered with both the Mac Pro and the 5600M GT that causes their current December 2022 drivers to be unable to be used, but the April 2022 drivers are working and working well, so I grabbed those. After installation, things went about as well as I hoped: gaming performance went from forgettable to great!
Shown in the picture below, I've got Destiny 2 up and running under Windows 10 on my MacBook Pro on the new monitor, playing at 3440x1440 with HDR on and FreeSync Premium Pro fully enabled and everything works beautifully. 5600M gives very respectable performance as well, managing 50-70 FPS in most areas of the game on Medium-High settings.
Only one snag I've hit that's very minor, and since everything works perfectly under Windows I'm assuming this is an Apple software problem and not an OWC hardware problem. I can run at 165 Hz with HDR on and FreeSync enabled in Windows 10, but under MacOS I have a choice of either running at 165 Hz with FreeSync enabled and no HDR or running at 100 Hz with HDR and no FreeSync. A little weird but not the end of the world. I'm chalking it up to Apple's support for HDR being half-baked as using HDR under MacOS just washes everything out as well instead of it using a proper wider color space as under Windows.
POWER
One thing that quickly became a massive annoyance and that I knew was coming was losing MagSafe charging. While Chinesium magnetic chargers are all over Amazon, there seem to be plethoras of reviews of them catching fire, overheating and melting, damaging the devices they are hooked up to, and more. Stuff of nightmares, especially for an expensive out-of-production Mac that is not so easily replaced. So I went hunting for a reputable magnetic charger maker and came across Volta's Spark cables and tips. They make a 60W general use version, and a 100W high power version. I got a set of three 100W cables in varying lengths and two tips, one for each side of the MacBook Pro. Several months on, they're working great. They never get too hot and there have been no shorts, melting, fires, or anything scary, and my Mac charges at the full 96W rate without issue when using their cables + tips. Pretty much the only negative is they don't support Thunderbolt 4, just USB 2.0. But that's fine, I just plug the Thunderbolt cable into one of the other two ports when docking the Mac to its workstation stack and using it as a desktop, and I'm good to go on that front.
Also I didn't want to run around with multiple chargers in my laptop bag so I hunted around and found Anker's 150W GaN charger. It's just what the doctor ordered. It's smaller and lighter than Apple's chargers, and I can charge my MacBook Pro and SteamDeck simultaneously at full power, or charge my MacBook Pro + iPad mini 6 + iPhone SE3 simultaneously, or charge all four simultaneously at somewhat reduced power. I was so pleased I ended up picking up a second one for my bedroom and just leaving everything that's normally on my nightstand when I go to bed at night permanently plugged into it.
eGPU
Next and last on the list is experimenting with running an eGPU for Bootcamp. I've been running my PC on a TITAN V for several years now and finally upgraded last month to an RTX A5500 after NVIDIA cut the prices of Ampere workstation cards by ~65% with the launch of Ada in December. Normally part of the GPU upgrade ritual is the old one goes on eBay and helps pay off the new one, but in this case I decided to hold onto the Titan card and find an eGPU enclosure for it and play with using it for my Mac. I ended up settling on the Akitio Node Titan. Akitio is a subbrand of OWC, so I figured I can't go wrong with a trusted Mac peripheral maker. There's also the Sonnet 750 breakaway box which from what I've read from Mac eGPU users is also great, but it's huge compared to the Node Titan and not very portable. The Node Titan on the other hand is not very much bigger than it absolutely needs to be, at 650W has more than enough power to feed the 250W needs of the card going into it, has a handy spring-loaded stowable metal carry handle, and as a bonus it not only matches the gray finish of my MacBook Pro but tickles my fancy being named the "Node Titan" and I'd be putting a Titan card inside it. There's also Razer, but given they can't seem to make peripherals that have any sort of longevity there's no way I'm trusting them with a workstation card.
So far I have the Titan V inside the Node Titan enclosure, and have hooked it up and even gamed on it via the Thunderbolt 4 ports on my PC so everything definitely works well. Next step is to try it with the Mac and I'll report back with findings. I'm fully aware an NVIDIA GPU won't be usable under MacOS but that's fine, the intent is for it to be able to game and do light work duty when booted into Windows 10.
The only complaint is the PSU fan has a bit of an annoying little audible whir to it. When I upgraded my PC last I switched from a Corsair SF600 Platinum SFX PSU to the Corsair SF750 Platinum SFX PSU to handle extra CPU power draw compared to my old build. The Node Titan uses a standard SFX PSU so I'm thinking I will see how the Node Titan comes apart and if it's an easy process and I don't need to damage anything, I will try upgrading its stock PSU to my old SF600. It'll lose 50W but those 50W are unneeded, and pulling only 250W for the GPU and supplying up to 85W to my MacBook Pro, the SF600 is unlikely to ever even heat up enough to exit fanless mode, so it'll get things quieted down.
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