Apple MacBook 13-inch 1.83GHz

Reviews: Hardware

Motherboards | Power Supplies | Memory | Systems | Video Cards

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Anthony Fiti
Kurtis
N/A
Aug. 1, 2006

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Testing - Performance

First and foremost is the performance of the operating system. I tested several cold boots, and on average, my boot time was 25 seconds. This is from a dead start as well, the machine off, from the time I hit the power button until the time the desktop, dock and my one finder folder were displayed. Note to you PC users out there, this would also include the time spent by your BIOS checking your system out. Especially with PC enthusiast motherboards out there that have extra RAID controllers and such, you can spend as much time as it took the MacBook to boot just in your POST screens before your operating system starts to boot.

To test the laptop's performance, I used a program called Handbrake to copy and transcode a DVD from the disc to the hard drive. During the conversion, I checked the processor utilization and it was at or close to 100% for the duration of the conversion. The MacBook was plugged into AC power the entire time to make sure the CPU speed would stay up at 1.83Ghz.

The video was encoded at Handbrake's default options, and the movie that was 125 minutes long was converted in 50 minutes. I tested with another movie that was about 105 minutes long and it took approximately 43 minutes to put it on the hard drive. Both of these numbers represent about 2.5x real-time encoding (that is, however long the movie is, it takes about 40% of that time to encode it).

My next test was World of Warcraft. I downloaded the Mac edition and signed up for a free 10-day trial. I played it for a while, and suffice to say I had to turn the settings down a good deal to get reasonable frame rates for a MMORPG (20-25fps). I had it operating in 1024x640 mode (widescreen), with the texture detail, weather effects, and most other settings turned down to minimal. Given that I was struggling to keep good frame rates in rather tranquil environments (I started out with a level 1 character and didn't do any major raids or venture into intense combat), I would not recommend trying to play WoW on this laptop in the configuration I have purchased (1.83GHz, 1GB RAM, etc). Some research has shown that people have gotten much more acceptable frame rates by bumping the system to 2GB of RAM (since OS X and WoW alone consume over 1GB of RAM), however I lack the cash to drop on new RAM (official Apple RAM is $600, Crucial wants $300).

While GMA950 is an improvement over previous integrated graphics cores, it won't be until the next generation (the 965-series integrated graphics) that we will see these games become closer to playable. This is due to the fact that the GMA950 relies on the processor to do some of its work, and in the 965 series, according to the information released so far (officially and unofficially), Intel will finally be joining us in the 21st Century of GPU technology with things like Hardware T&L, vertex shaders, etc. in order to be compatible with Vista.

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Page 10 of 14

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Ordering the MacBook
Page 3: First Looks
Page 4: Taking a Closer Look
Page 5: Setup & Packaged Software
Page 6: Testing - Hardware
Page 7: Testing - Software
Page 8: Testing - Interfacing with and Running Windows
Page 9: Testing - Temperature
Page 10: Testing - Performance
Page 11: Testing - Battery Life & MagSafe Adapter
Page 12: Tech Support Experience #1
Page 13: Tech Support Experience #2
Page 14: Conclusion

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