Yes, upgrade your MacBook Pro… DO IT NOW!

Of course I’m talking about the older MacBook Pro, not the new aluminum block ones.

I was always very suprised that Apple didn’t put 7200 RPM hard drives in their MacBooks.  It wasn’t a matter of them not being available and must have had more to do with their internal purchasing.  BUT after upgrading my MacBook Pro I can tell from experience that not putting the 7200 RPM drives in from the factory was a mistake.  The performance gains were phenominal!!

So I fould lots of instructions on the web about how to do it and even YouTube videos which were great.  The main trouble I had was in moving the OS and data.  After some trial and error I ended up using Carbon Copy Cloner and moving the entire old drive contents to the new drive which I had already formatted.  Anyway I’m rambling…

I ordered a 320 GB 7200 RPM HDD and a 4 GB memory kit from New Egg for under $140 with shipping.  I took extra care to benchmark prior to the upgrade using XBench (http://www.xbench.com/) and got an overall score of 108.  After the upgrades I re-ran XBench and got a score of 127!!  Nearly a 20 point gain!!  If you haven’t used XBench before you won’t realize how huge of a gain that is, but believe me- it’s HUGE.  Now my old MacBook Pro that I’ve had for over 2 years out performs the newest iMacs coming out!  My XBench results on the new iMacs can be found in another post called “Are the newest iMacs any faster?”  Oddly enough the new iMacs actually score lower than my MacBook Pro did before the upgrade.  Figure that one out…

The laptop is like a new machine!  I strongly urge you to upgrade your old MacBook Pro.  You will be so happy and giggle with delight so much that a little pee will come out.

Check back soon as I will post the XBench results from the new aluminum MacBooks.

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Exactly how much faster are the new iMacs that were just released a few weeks ago?  The answer: They’re Not…

I was so excited to get the newest iMac and evidently was one of the first because my order needed to be modified from what I had ordered and upgraded to a comporable nextgen.  After moving everything over to the new iMac using Carbon Copy Cloner (http://www.bombich.com/software/index.html and awesome software BTW) I ran XBench (http://www.xbench.com/).  Now it’s important to note that I had already installed XBench on my old iMac and there were absolutely no changes prior to re-running XBench on the new iMac.

To my great disappointment the XBench score was lower on the new iMac!

As you can see the only place the new iMac scored higher than the old one was under the Thread test!

The NVidia GeForce 9400 is only PCI where the ATI Radeon HD2400 is PCI Express at full x16 so even though the ATI is an older chipset and has 128 MB less VRAM it still out perfoms the NVidia.  I should also point out that the VRAM on this NVidia chip is shared with system ram where the ATI on the previous generation isn’t.  This explains exactly why the new system was using more RAM right out of the box!

So, don’t go rushing out ready to trade in your iMac for the new ones because the bottom line is that they just don’t perform as well as expected!  The exception to this would be in the new 24″ iMacs.  At least get the new iMac with the GeForce 120 or 130.  These have dedicated GDDR3 memory and are much better chipsets.

If you have one of the new 24″ iMacs please post your XBench results here!  I would love to see how much better they perform than the 20″ iMacs.

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