You’re probably getting tired of all the new MacBook news. So let’s take a break! On the lighter side…wait, did somebody say “benchmarks?” Okay, just this one more story.
Macworld lab guru James Galbraith has put two MacBooks through their paces, a 1.83GHz Core Duo model and a 2.0GHz Core Duo model (white and black respectively, if the aesthetics matter to you). The results were not very surprising: the MacBooks bested both the PowerPC-based iBooks and PowerBooks that they’re replacing, but fell shy of the MacBook Pro and Intel-based iMac in pretty much all of the tests (the G4 PowerBook did beat all comers in the Photoshop test, since it was running on the Intel-based machines via Rosetta).
Also of particular note (though again, not surprising) were the results on the graphics tests:
These new portables use integrated Intel graphics that share the main memory, as opposed to the ATI Mobility Radeon graphics with dedicated memory found in the MacBook Pro models. You can see the advantage of having dedicated graphics memory in our Unreal Tournament test. The MacBook Pro tallies 63 frames per second, compared to a little less than 18 for the MacBook. The 1.67GHz PowerBook G4 tallied a score of 21.4 frames per second in that test. So if you’re a serious gamer, the MacBook is probably not the right system for you.Well, my current laptop is hardly a gaming machine either, so I’m not terribly worried about that. But it’s good to know.
