News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

November 8, 2007

hardware

Updated MacBooks slightly faster, we hear

Posted Nov. 8, ’07, 1:57 PM PT by Thomas Gagnon-van Leeuwen
Category | Hardware

Last week’s minor update to the MacBook wasn’t very publicized by Apple—after all, none of the improvements were groundbreaking. But there were some welcome changes, especially the RAM limit up from 2 to 4GB, and of course the replacement of the Intel GMA 950 graphics with the newer X3100. And to see how this impacts the notebook’s overall performance, our friend James Galbraith at Macworld published his obligatory lab tests and benchmarks.

Overall, the new MacBooks are slightly faster than their predecessors, with the top-of-the-line model even beating out the low-end MacBook Pro by one point in Macworld’s new Speedmark 5 benchmarking suite. Let’s see how the new graphics help game performance:

Our game benchmark results show the benefit of the new X3100, with the new black 2.2GHz MacBook able to display 37-percent more frames than the 2.16GHz MacBook from the last generation when playing Unreal Tournament 2004. Unfortunately, that’s still about one-third the amount of frames per second a 2.2GHz MacBook Pro can display, but it’s still a decent performance boost.

In conclusion, it seems the MacBook still isn’t a great gaming machine, but at least it’s a little better. And since RAM is constantly going down in price, the MacBook’s best new spec may well be the ability to accept 4GB of memory.


1 Comments

Alan said:

Just for the record, the previous models of macbook can support 3gigs of ram, not just 2.

Yes, you loose the speed benefit of not having matched DDR2 sticks, but it is only a 2-3% speed loss at most, and personally, I'll take the speed GAIN of not having to run out to virtual memory over that any day, especially as a user of parallels.

Check with other world computing if you don't believe me about how much ram you can have, or of the very minimal speed loss you get from not having matched ddr2 ram.

I have 2 13" macbooks with 3 gigs ram and they both run fine. Any any compatible ram seems to work, I have corsair in one and kingston in the other.

Al

November 10, 2007 11:24 AM

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