I got my 2.13 ghz 15" Macbook Pro a little over a month ago and I did not know that a new MBP would be coming out. So, honestly is there THAT much of a difference from my MBP then the santa rosa MBP ? Does the LCD screens, better wireless, extra ghz, really make a huge difference ?
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Honestly, how different is the old MBP from the new MBP ?
- Thread starter xcrskim
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The CPU speed isn't much of a difference, but the new ones have a faster FSB which will make the computer run faster. Additionally they can now address up to 4 gigs of ram instead of 3 in your machine. It has a graphics card that is about at least twice as good as the x1600 in your mbp, and the led backlit displays provides brighter screens with more even lighting.
IMO, the only "real" worthwhile updates is the LED backlighting in the 15" as well as the additional addressable 1gb of ram and higher FSB.
Hell yeah.
Apart from the LED backlighting, the new GPU, and the larger hard drive size. That is about it.
However
I will upgrade from the old MBPs to the new ones solely on account of the screen alone. Only blind people can fail to see the problem in the previous generation of MacBook Pros imho.
What I wonder is how useful is that 800mhz FSB when the memory is only 667mhz? Is the memory now a bottleneck?
No, it's not, I don't know how much better the screens are, you already have 802.11n draft wireless, I couldn't care less about extra cpu speed.
They major advantages is that you can actually use 4GB ram if you put that in, in that the graphics are probably around 50% faster and supports DX10 if you will be gaming in Vista. Except that it's also 2000 sek cheaper here in Sweden than last modell was and you get 2GB ram instead, but ram is very cheap now.
So is it a major difference? No. Was it a bad idea to buy a mac as long after the latest update / near the next one? Yes. Only time macs are quite price worthy is immediatly after an update, then it will just get less and less price worthy since prices aren't adjusted with time.
If you had bought this generation the next one would of course be even better, and so on... So you can't get rid of that effect, just a little bad that you didn't got a lower price on the mbp you bought since imho prices should be adjusted with time.
As long as the memory doesn't run faster will the faster FSB do any major difference at all? I doubt that, a lot.
The new graphics card isn't "twice as good", heck even Apple says "more than 50% faster".
The latest tests from barefeats.com seem to indicate that the processing power increase is marginal, including any extra performance from the FSB. The gaming results (contingent on the video card) do show a more significant improvement, but I don't think it even adds up to close to 50% better.
Based on these results, it seems like Santa Rosa got bottlenecked by the memory speed.
Based on these results, it seems like Santa Rosa got bottlenecked by the memory speed.
Don't worry about it. You've got a great machine there and you will be productive for a long time. Its not like your computer just got slower or anything.
The main difference I think is the graphics, but I think you'll be fine. Plenty of people are doing graphics intensive stuff & playing games on the older MBPs just fine - even on the MacBooks.
Its just part of the normal upgrade cycle... it won't take long until my computer isn't leading edge, but that's okay. I'll be making good use out of it even then.
The main difference I think is the graphics, but I think you'll be fine. Plenty of people are doing graphics intensive stuff & playing games on the older MBPs just fine - even on the MacBooks.
Its just part of the normal upgrade cycle... it won't take long until my computer isn't leading edge, but that's okay. I'll be making good use out of it even then.
The 8600M GT is supposed to be 2-3 times better than the Go 7600 GT. Saw some nvidia comparison slides somewhere.
I don't know where the X1600 stacks up to that, but I should think it would be comparable to the 7600.
A review of the 2.4GHz 15" MBP in Bootcamp gives a 3dmark'06 score of well over 4000. That is damn good, and what you would expect from this card. Why the MBP doesn't reflect these performance benefits in OSX, I don't have a clue. Probably has something to do with the dismal UT2004 results found by Macworld. Probably really crappy drivers.
Basically, before we judge just how much better the 8600M GT is over the X1600, we really need some Bootcamp benchmarks in games.
Now I just have to go find all those damn references...
Meh. Too lazy.
The memory controller is dual channel, so mem accesses can be up to 2x667MHz, depending on a variety of factors etc., and assuming you have matched pairs of DIMMs installed.
So yes, it's still useful.
This is likely one reason Apple chose to ship the MBP with both DIMM slots populated this time -- well, that and it's cheaper than a single 2GB DIMM.
QFT.
If you're to take tests with the current Mac drivers for the 8600M as the rule, then the 8600 is sometimes slower than the X1600 (http://www.barefeats.com/santarosa.html - Halo test). It is quite apparent that the current Mac drivers for the 8600 are abysmal.
Yeah. No doubt they will find themselves in a system update, maybe 10.4.10 soonish. If not, then you'll just have to make do in XP or Vista with nvidia's own drivers.
One would hope, but I haven't a clue; I don't work for Apple. For now, I'll be sticking to Bootcamp/Windows for my gaming needs.
Rather, it's not much faster, noone have said it would be either?
Santa Rosa benefits:
7% faster at the same Hz or something. (marginal)
800MHz FSB. (marginal at same memory speed)
Better power saving (probably very marginal)
Can turn of one core and overclock the other one slightly until same heat development (might be good for games running only one thread, if it ever kicks in)
But then I don't care much about cpus at all, anything faster than 1.6GHz P4 or so is ok
I call ********, in 3dmark06 scores maybe, but that's not the same as 2-3x times more fps. I guess one can argue what better really is, maybe just that it can handle dx10 makes it 2 times better to begin with, even if frame speeds are the same...
Also thought 7600 GT is a nice chip the go versions aren't as fast.
4000 3dmark06 vs 2000 3dmark06 doesn't have to mean that you get 2 times better fps in the games you actually play. Judge by the games you wanna plays fps and image quality, not benchmark scores.
I would guess the memory bus is rather twice as wide, not run twice as fast, but I don't know.
Anyway yes, of course dual channel is faster, but the old ones could do dual channel in 667MHz aswell so..
I really hope I don't fall into that, the only reason (more or less) I want a mac is so I don't have to dual boot, if I have to dual boot I could just run Vista and FreeBSD+KDE anyway...
No, it's not running twice as fast. It's a simplification to get everything into the same units, in this case clockspeed.
Here's how it works: (again, simplified)
[CPU] <===FSB==> [Northbridge] <===Mem Buses===> [DIMMS]
The dual channel aspect means you can pull from both DIMMs at once (in the right circumstances). That means you're pushing (up to) 2x64bits@667MHz into one 800MHz 64bit FSB. Hence the reason a faster FSB is desirable.
On the old MBP models, it didn't matter if dual-channel mode was enabled or not because there was no way to gain[*] from it -- the FSB was synchronous, so you couldn't take more bandwidth than a single memory channel could supply anyway.
If the faster FSB didn't offer any performance improvement, it'd actually be a negative -- it draws more power than a 667MHz FSB, and being non-synchronous it can result in wait-states occasionally.
[*] Note that the MacBook, by dint of using an IGP that is built into the northbridge, does indeed gain from dual channel being enabled.
I am aware of all this. I must say that I don't remember where I saw these slides, but I do remember that they were supposed to be from nvidia, if they weren't on their website. They showed a 2-3x performance boost in games, and 4-5x better benchmarking scores. They claimed these game improvements in things like Doom, Quake, FEAR, etc.
I'll try again to find it again, but i'm not having much luck.
OK, found the slides on a different site, they look the same though, but I SWEAR that they showed 2-3x performance gains last time I checked... Now it's more like 20%...
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2984
(Really frieked out right now...)