MW: New MacBooks Rival MacBook Pro Performance

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In standard benchmark tests, Appleis new MacBooks rivaled the performance of the more expensive MacBook Pros, even in Quake 4 frame rates, according to Macworld on Friday.

"In fact, in our Speedmark 5 performance tests, the latest 2.4GHz MacBook within a few points of the Speedmark score of the new entry-level MacBook Pro—a 2.4GHz laptop that costs $400 more than the $1,599 MacBook," James Galbraith wrote.

Itis well known that the last generation (plastic) MacBooks were weak in graphics performance, thanks (or no thanks) to Intelis X3100 integrated graphics that shared memory with with the system RAM. These MacBooks were unsuitable for the most advanced games and Appleis own Final Cut Pro.

All thatis changed, according to the suite of benchmarks published by Macworld. The 2.4 GHz aluminum MacBook achieved the best results in 4 of the 9 tests while the 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro achieved the best score in only three. However, in some cases the results were so close as to be irrelevant for most users.

Apple made a bold move with the NVIDIA graphics in the MacBook. Instead of differentiating the MacBook from the MacBook Pro line with plastic vs. aluminum industrial design and inferior integrated graphics, Apple has moved to make FireWire, screen size, really advanced graphics, and some subtleties in storage the key differentiators.

Thatis going to make a lot of MacBook buyers very happy.

John Martellaro

John Martellaro

John Martellaro was born at an early age and began writing about computers soon after that. He is a former U.S. Air Force officer and has worked for NASA, White Sands Missile Range, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Apple. At Apple he worked as a Senior Marketing Manager, a Federal Account Executive and a High Performance Computing manager. His interests include skiing, chess, science fiction and astronomy. You can follow John on Twitter at twitter.com/jmartellaro.

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