*helps fellow trampled mac user up and brushes him off*

I bet you could manage on low gfx, which is perfectly acceptably as an alternative away from home. I play on an 2011 iMac (the 1GB gfx) and although it's way faster than yours with the integrated graphics, your processor is still kinda-sorta OK and you do have 4GB of ram, which is better than 2GB that most other airs have.

To you others, SHAME on you! Help a guy out with an honest question instead of attacking him like that. What on earth makes you lot react like that anyway?

Macbook Air looks cool, but I'm not sure if the video card will satisfy your gaming needs, you will need at least a 15' MBP to get the dedicated video card!

Top spec MBPs are about 6 months behind the top spec Win7 laptops like Alienware or Dell XPS (yes it's the same company but they also have different builds/cases).

If you go with a similar spec Win7 laptop you can save $200-900, depending on what you get of course, which you can just pocket, or put into a blu-ray drive, better RAM and/or a better video card.

If you do go with the MBP and you want to game on it you have to be prepared to set up boot camp with Win 7, which means you have to spend for a Windows 7 license on top of that. The only reason you should get a MBP over a pure Win 7 gaming laptop is if you actually need and use the Mac OS and/or have money to burn.

Well... I think I'm going to give it a try anyway. I will do the following:

- Run the game in a clean Windows 7 native boot (via bootcamp)
- Use Intel drivers to max speed (trade off for lower quality)
- Play the game on minimum everything...
- Pray

Worst thing is I waste a little bit of time ... I'll report back once my little experiment is complete.

I'd just be sure to check your temperatures. You wouldn't want that thing to overheat

It's Apple, don't expect it to work with games.

No it won't, unfortunatly games doesn't just split the load as it pleases between CPU and GPU, Your CPU should be quite far above the minimum but the GPU is quite far below and will stall everything (Thus your CPU will sit idle most of the time waiting for the GPU to finish).
You'll be better off buying an old used $600 PC laptop with a proper GPU.

Personally i'd recommend going with Asus for gaming laptops, They are reasonably well built and not overpriced like Sony or Dell.

Actually.. Skyrim plays reasonably well on mediocre graphics settings on the Intel i5 iGPU laptop i have here using the HD3000 series gpu. Surprisingly well in fact.

I was actually quite impressed with the originally launched iGPU with the 510 series i3 when they first launched. and that was the HD1000 on the lowest form.

The HD3000 performance as well as a HD5300/5400 series ATI card or Nvidia 410/430.... Yes it's a bit of a shock.

What may be a sticking issue is that lack of ram, the intel igpu generally only allows up to about 256/512mb of TOTAL ram set aside from it's usage, and of course this takes away from the existing 4gb. Increasing the physical ram to 6 or 8gb in the laptop or in a desktop with these solutions CAN provided the motherboard/bios allows it, bring the igpu a total of 1gb of reserved ram for itself, allowing the programs to consume their 4gb 32bit limits like skyrim with the LAA patch, leaving 1gb free for background processes on a 6gb system or 3gb for 8gb system.

Don't ever underestimate the intel iGPU's.. specially the fastest one that is used on the i7.. which is higher clocked and so forth. If i can get playable frame rates on the i5 iGPU at stock values...

Thanks for the somewhat encouraging reply.

I am taking my optical drive home tonight so that I can install it and find out ... check back tomorrow

I have a macbook pro 2011 with a core i5 2300 2.3Ghz cpu and HD3000 gfx (which is more powerful than any macbook air afaik). It is a wonderful laptop for typing (best laptop keyboards are macbook pro keyboards) and has an awesome LED display however, it is not for gaming. You will pay $60 for a game and get only $10 worth of enjoyment out of it due to the almost non-existent visual quality (if the game even runs at all and if the game was even released for the mac). I don't mean to sound like a mac hater, but if you want to play big budget games (like Skyrim, BF3 etc), get a console or get a desktop/laptop PC.

just make sure you have the latest drivers.

Visit Intel's download center.. the most recent driver is i believe october... and provided numerous performance improvements.

I personally do clean installs of all the laptops i setup and sell, meaning there is no garbage on the machines at all, and i take the time to go through and install all the necessary chipset drivers, audio drivers, video drivers, intel rapid storage controller drivers which are all the latest and greatest.

MOST laptops come preloaded with beta/half baked drivers.... Windows update drivers are usually out of date AND typically are missing half of the necessary graphics components... even for intel...

I recognize that you were trying to provide helpful feedback, which is appreciated, BUT:

How many people don't read the first line of my post where it says I OWN AND PLAY ON A GAMING PC!

The whole premise is that I am wondering whether I can play Skyrim while out of town ... on my laptop. Which I already own...

Your Macbook Air is great, although overpriced, for everything you bought it for (weight, battery life, surfing the web and working on the go). However, it won't be great for playing a game like Skyrim. Give it a shot though and let us know the results.

I am not sure how it would run on that but I will give you a comparison. To all that say the CPU is too weak I run the a game on High setting with this laptop just fine:

1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T5550, 4GB, 667MHz DDR2, Nvidia GeForce Go 8800gts (512ram), Windows 7 64bit. laptop is Gateway P-6860 FX

btw this laptop is about 3 years old.

Core 2 Duo is a hefty CPU. My friends dual core i7...is really not much of an upgrade. I only said that from experience. I am playing on a laptop that is a quad i7 with a mobile 5450 ati card. Medium settings - 20 FPS.

The idea of installing Win7 on bootcamp is probably best. You'll be able to use more of the machine's horsepower. I'm curious what you find out.