MacBook Pro Benchmarks

jfpoole writes "Geek Patrol has benchmarked a MacBook Pro and a PowerBook G4 using Geekbench, their benchmarking utility. It's impressive to see how well the MacBook Pro performs compared to the PowerBook G4 (at least when it comes to Universal Binary performance)." Their benchmarks aren't particularly surprising, and they lack the most important benchmark: Frames Per Second during Molten Core Combat (or as it is more commonly referred to since I made it up 5 seconds ago, the FPSDMCCMark, which is the only number I'm waiting for).

battery life

[Tibor the Hun]

anyone have any numbers on battery life?
3 hours? 5? DVD playing? airport on/off?
because, that's, you know kinda important when it comes to laptops...

Re:Why just benched against another Mac?

[aftk2]

I agree with you, and as a Mac user, this is kind of frustrating (the occasional disparity between Mac & Windows versions of the same program). However, you might be interested in this: Ableton Live 5.2 Benchmarks [macrumors.com]. It benchmarks multiple versions of the program, on Windows and OS X with different processors.

FireWire 800 Was Stupid

[ImaNihilist]

There is something that some of you forget about FW800. FireWire 800 was a mistake to begin with. There is no FireWire chipset that I know of that sits on the PCIe bus. That means, that if FW800 is on the PCI bus, it almost completely saturates the entire bus ITSELF. It was pointless. Until someone comes out with a FW controller that sits on the PCIe bus, FW800 is best left to something like ExressCard 54.

In theory, a FW 800 Express Card should be superior to FW800 built onto the PCI bus.

When the next generation of FW controllers come out that sit on the PCIe bus, then it will make sense. FW800 is just a little to early. Soon.

Re:WOW is GPU, not CPU intensive

[Anonymous Coward]

The processor 'redlines' because it is in a single-threaded tight loop of running game code, sending data to the GPU and polling input devices. Unless the process actually goes to sleep you will always see 100% usage. You see ~50-60% with two CPUs because that's the usage for both CPUs, but most video games can only use one CPU. Even when it needs to wait for the GPU it will just skip rendering and continue spinning polling inputs and running the game code. So CPU usage as reported by the operating system tells you nothing of how in-game performance is being limited.

Re:battery life

[1336.5]

my friend just got his yesterday and he gets 3.5 hours with wireless on, near 5 with it off.

not too bad but it needs 5 with wireless.

Re:WOW is GPU, not CPU intensive

[Anonymous Coward]

This turns out not to be the case.

Comparing a 2GHz iMac G5 with a 2GHz iMac-CoreDuo, we see that the iMac-CoreDuo has four times the L2 cache and maybe about half the main memory latency on cache misses. It really adds up. Even if you disable one of the Intel-CPU cores to try and make a fair fight.

WoW has almost always been CPU limited on the Mac; the new Macs have much better CPU's and memory controllers. One can see that it's rather tough to run a totally fair test - there's no X1600/RV530 card for G5 available, and no way to plug in a G5-class video card into the new Intel machines, but believe you me, the change in CPU and RAM throughput is significant going from the previous iMac G5 to the new iMac.

(signed, one of the Mac WoW developers)