The latest MacBook update is the first hardware announcement by Apple since Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X, was released on October 26. Bearing in mind that the operating system greatly affects the performance of the system, we had to modify our test suite, so now we will test with Speedmark 5. We have added a few tests, removed others, and changed the base system to a 1.5GHz Intel Core Solo Mac mini with 2GB of RAM with Mac OS X 10.5.
In the Speedmark 5, the two new 2.2 GHz MacBooks got pretty much the same performance, with the black model getting a value of 186 compared to the white model, which we got a rating of 185. The new one The 2 GHz MacBook scored a Speedmark of 172, around 7.5 percent slower than the current black 2.2 GHz model and 4 percent slower compared to the white 2.16 GHz MacBook of the previous generation.
Overall, the results show that the 2.2 GHz models finish each test just a few seconds faster compared to the 2.16 GHz MacBooks, with the new 2 GHz model at the tail of the pack (albeit with very respectable indices in the case of the latter system).
One area where the new MacBooks have established a significant improvement is in game ratings. Although they are still far from being the ideal machine for gamers, the new MacBooks use Intel’s GMA X3100 graphics with 144 MB of RAM shared with the main memory of the system. Previous models used the GMA 950 chip with only 64MB of shared memory. Our gaming benchmarks show the clear advantage of the new X3100, with the new black 2.2 GHz MacBook capable of displaying 37 percent more frames compared to the 2.16 GHz next generation MacBook. earlier in Unreal Tournament 2004. Unfortunately, this is still around a third of the number of frames per second a 2.2GHz MacBook Pro can display, but it’s still a pretty decent performance boost. For new games, like Quake 4, the results still show improvement, but in our tests at the highest quality settings at 1,024 x 768 pixels, none of the MacBooks can be considered suitable for games.
The new MacBooks also have a faster system bus at 800 MHz compared to 667 MHz for the previous front end bus. Now they also support up to a maximum of 4 GB of RAM, which is an increase of 2 GB over the maximum amount supported by previous models. An interesting aspect is that the black 2.2 GHz MacBook gets a higher Speedmark rating compared to the current 2.2 GHz MacBook Pro. With identical Intel processor speeds, we were not surprised to see similar results between the MacBook and the MacBook. Pro for our Cinema 4D tests, but with what appears to be a slower hard drive in the MacBook Pro, the newer 2.2GHz MacBooks were actually faster than the MacBook Pro in virtually all non-laptop tests. games.
