MacBook Pro Core i7 review
Performance, graphics and battery life
This is really where everything is at for these new machines. Apple's finally upgraded to the Core 2010 processors, which bring with them cores galore, along with Turbo Boost tech for automatic overclocking of the chip based on demand. Software utilization of multiple cores has come a long way, but it's still not perfect, so Turbo Boost switches off a couple of the extra cores when they're not needed to make room for overclocking of the remaining cores -- to pretty dramatic effect at times. We're testing out the top-of-the-line 2.66GHz Core i7 machine with NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 512MB graphics, 4GB of RAM, and 500GB HDD, which retails for $2,199.
We aren't what you would call power users in a rendering-Pixar-movies sort of way, but we can still tax a machine just fine. We're usually running a couple browsers at once, frequently batch process piles of photos, edit videos the quick and dirty way in iMovie or QuickTime, and dabble with GarageBand from time to time. Slowdowns and hiccups are the norm on even the best machine with what we've got going on. Unsurprisingly, Core i7 hasn't made this all go away. Instead, it's just made it happen less. It's obvious that the machine can juggle just a bit more at once, launch apps a bit faster, pop open dialogues just a bit quicker, and so forth. Of course, this is all hard to quantify and is rather subjective, but we feel it.
To really bust on the processor more specifically we fired up some Flash video, pitting our new Core i7 Pro against an "old" MacBook Pro with a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 4GB of RAM. Both machines are actually pretty strong when running a single bit of Flash at a time, but it's when a couple dozen tabs are open all slamming the processor at once that things get difficult. We fired up Hulu in 480p (the new Glee episode) and a 1080p Avatar trailer on YouTube with both machines managing to keep both videos playing smoothly. Once we added a second 1080p YouTube trailer on each machine, however, the Core 2 Duo machine began to choke, while the Core i7 juggled all three videos successfully.
On a more empirical front we ran some HTML and Flash tests using GUIMark. With Firefox 3.6.3 and Flash 10.0.45.2, we managed 21.31 FPS on HTML and 21.04 FPS on Flash on the new machine, while the old MBP only managed 15.99 FPS and 16.1 FPS, respectively.
We also tried out a 720p video export in iMovie. Of course the GPU gets called in for previewing live effects and whatnot, and we found the entire UI very responsive, but video exports are still a CPU affair, and the new machine thrashed the old one with a 5 minute export vs. 9 minutes.
Here are some more standard benchmarks:
GeekBench
XBench OpenGL
XBench
CPU XBench Thread
MacBook Pro 15 - 2010 (2.66GHz Core i7, NVIDIA GT 330M) 5395 228.22 218.96 486.60
MacBook Pro 15 - 2009 (2.66GHz Core 2 Duo, NVIDIA 9600M)
3700
163.44 188.62 319.58
This is really where everything is at for these new machines. Apple's finally upgraded to the Core 2010 processors, which bring with them cores galore, along with Turbo Boost tech for automatic overclocking of the chip based on demand. Software utilization of multiple cores has come a long way, but it's still not perfect, so Turbo Boost switches off a couple of the extra cores when they're not needed to make room for overclocking of the remaining cores -- to pretty dramatic effect at times. We're testing out the top-of-the-line 2.66GHz Core i7 machine with NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 512MB graphics, 4GB of RAM, and 500GB HDD, which retails for $2,199.
We aren't what you would call power users in a rendering-Pixar-movies sort of way, but we can still tax a machine just fine. We're usually running a couple browsers at once, frequently batch process piles of photos, edit videos the quick and dirty way in iMovie or QuickTime, and dabble with GarageBand from time to time. Slowdowns and hiccups are the norm on even the best machine with what we've got going on. Unsurprisingly, Core i7 hasn't made this all go away. Instead, it's just made it happen less. It's obvious that the machine can juggle just a bit more at once, launch apps a bit faster, pop open dialogues just a bit quicker, and so forth. Of course, this is all hard to quantify and is rather subjective, but we feel it.
To really bust on the processor more specifically we fired up some Flash video, pitting our new Core i7 Pro against an "old" MacBook Pro with a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 4GB of RAM. Both machines are actually pretty strong when running a single bit of Flash at a time, but it's when a couple dozen tabs are open all slamming the processor at once that things get difficult. We fired up Hulu in 480p (the new Glee episode) and a 1080p Avatar trailer on YouTube with both machines managing to keep both videos playing smoothly. Once we added a second 1080p YouTube trailer on each machine, however, the Core 2 Duo machine began to choke, while the Core i7 juggled all three videos successfully.
On a more empirical front we ran some HTML and Flash tests using GUIMark. With Firefox 3.6.3 and Flash 10.0.45.2, we managed 21.31 FPS on HTML and 21.04 FPS on Flash on the new machine, while the old MBP only managed 15.99 FPS and 16.1 FPS, respectively.
We also tried out a 720p video export in iMovie. Of course the GPU gets called in for previewing live effects and whatnot, and we found the entire UI very responsive, but video exports are still a CPU affair, and the new machine thrashed the old one with a 5 minute export vs. 9 minutes.
Here are some more standard benchmarks:
GeekBench
XBench OpenGL
XBench
CPU XBench Thread
MacBook Pro 15 - 2010 (2.66GHz Core i7, NVIDIA GT 330M) 5395 228.22 218.96 486.60
MacBook Pro 15 - 2009 (2.66GHz Core 2 Duo, NVIDIA 9600M)
3700
163.44 188.62 319.58
