Apple began November introducing a revamp line of MacBook laptops . get ’s conclude out the month with a few parole about another ware foretell alongside the MacBook update — a build - to - order configuration of the MacBook Pro .
If you think , on the same day Apple boosted the CPU speeds and made other national changes to its MacBook railway line , it also announced the availability a raw , loyal 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo central processing unit for the MacBook Pro . The 2.6GHz mainframe is a $ 250 upgrade over the $ 2,499 and $ 2,799 models that ship with the 2.4GHz Core 2 duet .
Macworld Lab order and received a 15 - column inch MacBook Pro with the dissipated processor . It should come as no surprise that this tradition - make MacBook Pro is the fastest portable Mac to date .
asunder from the processor , the customized MacBook Pro parcel thesame tech specsas the high-pitched - end laptop computer model introduced in June . In the character of the 15 - inch MacBook Pro we used in this examination , that have in mind a 160 GB hard thrust and an Nvidia GeForce 8600 M GT graphics processor . For the function of comparison , we also included a freshly update MacBook — the top - of - the - line 2.2GHz manakin — in this latest rung of tests .
2.6GHz MacBook Pro BenchmarksSpeedmark 5Adobe Photoshop CS3Cinema 4D XL 10.5Compressor 3iMovie HDiTunes 7.5Unreal Tournament 2004Quake 4FinderHandBrakeOVERALL SCORESUITERENDERMPEG2 EncodeAged EffectMP3 ENCODEFRAME RATEFRAME RATEZIP ARCHIVEH.264 ENCODE15 - inch MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo/2.6GHz*2081:140:511:570:471:0277.851.34:472:5215 - inch MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo/2.4GHz1981:170:552:070:501:0575.446.35:023:05MacBook Core 2 Duo/2.2GHz ( black)1841:171:002:050:511:1325.77.85:133:14 > BetterBetter > Better
undecomposed outcome inbold . Reference scheme in italics . * denotes build - to - order model .
Speedmark 5 scores are comparative to those of a 1.5GHz Core Solo Mac mini , which is impute a mark of 100 . Adobe Photoshop , Cinema 4D XL , iMovie , iTunes , and Finder heaps are in minutes : seconds . All system were go Mac OS X 10.5.1 with 2 GB of RAM . The Photoshop Suite test is a circle of 14 written undertaking using a 50 mebibyte file . Photoshop ’s remembering was determine to 70 percentage and History was set to Minimum . We immortalize how long it took to render a setting in Cinema 4D XL . We used Compressor to encode a 6 minute , 26second DV file cabinet using the DVD : Fastest Encode 120 transactions – 4:3 setting . In iMovie , we applied the of age Film effect from the Video FX . menu to a one minute picture . We converted 45 arcminute of AAC audio file to MP3 using iTunes ’ High Quality setting . We used Unreal Tournament 2004 ’s Antalus Botmatch ordinary - frames - per - second score ; we tested at a resolution of 1,024 by 768 pixels at the Maximum mount with both audio and computer graphic enabled . We ran Quake 4 timedemo at a resolution of 1,024 by 768 pel at High Quality scope . We created a Zip archive in the Finder from a 2 GB folder . To liken Speedmark 5 scores for various Mac systems , call our Apple Hardware Guide .—MACWORLD LAB examination BY JAMES GALBRAITH , JERRY JUNG , AND BRIAN CHEN
The 2.6GHz MacBook Pro show about a 5 - percent performance boost over the 2.4GHz in our Speedmark 5 benchmark . That ’s a little bit less than the 8 - percent difference in clock speed , but the tests that make up Speedmark meter more than just processor public presentation .
In processor - intensive labor , like render a vista in Cinema4D , the 2.6GHz MacBook Pro beat the 2.4GHz model by more than 7 per centum . In other tests , the 2.6GHz organization was faster across the board , though by tolerance nigher to the 5 - percent range .
As for the MacBook , it maintain its own on most tests , except for 3 - D games , where it continues to be penalize for its integrated art that share memory with the system . The MacBook Pro models have consecrate memory for graphics .
We do n’t black eye - rate build - to - order framework , but hopefully these results will help you settle if the redundant processing baron is worth the $ 250 when compared to Apple ’s received MacBook Pro offerings .
[ James Galbraith is theater director of Macworld Lab . ]
