Thanks to the magic of salary sacrifice I’ve updated my late 2006 MacBook Pro to a shiny new 17″ Core i7 MacBook Pro.
The old machine has served me well these last three years but it has really started to show it’s age. Lately for work I have needed to spend more time working in a virtual machine, the 2GB of RAM and 140GB hard drive on the old machine were just not cutting it.
Specs for the new machine
- 2.66GHz Core i7
- 8GB RAM 1066MHz DDR3
- 17″ Anti-glare display (1920×1200)
- Intel HD Graphics 256MB DDR3 + GeForce GT330M 512MB DDR3
- 500GB 7200 RPM HDD
I haven’t had much time to play with it yet but it is certainly much snappier than the old one.
I ran GeekBench 32-bit on the new and old machines (the 64-bit version of GeekBench is paid only)
| Late 2006 MacBook Pro | |||
| Summary | |||
| GeekBench Score | 3131 | ||
| Integer | 2547 | ||
| Floating Point | 4749 | ||
| Memory | 2077 | ||
| Stream | 1627 | ||
| System Information | |||
| Operating System | Mac OS X 10.6.2 (Build 10C540) | ||
| Model | MacBook Pro (17-inch Core 2 Duo) | Motherboard | Apple Computer, Inc. Mac-F42189C8 PVT |
| Processor | Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T7600 @ 2.33GHz | ||
| Processor ID | GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 15 Stepping 6 | ||
| Processors | 1 | Threads | 2 |
| Cores | 2 | Memory | 2.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM |
| Processor Frequency | 2.33 GHz | Bus Frequency | 664 MHz |
| L1 Instruction Cache | 32.0 KB | L1 Data Cache | 32.0 KB |
| L2 Cache | 4.00 MB | L3 Cache | 0.00 B |
| BIOS | Apple Inc. MBP21.88Z.00A5.B08.0802291403 | ||
| 2010 MacBook Pro | |||
| Summary | |||
| GeekBench Score | 5363 | ||
| Integer | 4124 | ||
| Floating Point | 8487 | ||
| Memory | 3268 | ||
| Stream | 2962 | ||
| System Information | |||
| Operating System | Mac OS X 10.6.3 (Build 10D2094) | ||
| Model | MacBook Pro (17-inch Early 2010) | Motherboard | Apple Inc. Mac-F22589C8 |
| Processor | Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU M 620 @ 2.67GHz | ||
| Processor ID | GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 37 Stepping 2 | ||
| Processors | 1 | Threads | 4 |
| Cores | 2 | Memory | 8.00 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 |
| Processor Frequency | 2.66 GHz | Bus Frequency | 4.80 GHz |
| L1 Instruction Cache | 32.0 KB | L1 Data Cache | 32.0 KB |
| L2 Cache | 256 KB | L3 Cache | 4.00 MB |
| BIOS | Apple Inc. MBP61.88Z.0057.B05.1003191134 | ||
The GeekBench score shows a 58% increase in performance which will definitely make life easier for me.
On top of the obvious advantage of having a shiny new machine I will be passing the old MBP on to Viv so now I will actually be able to use my laptop at night when the kids are in bed 😉
See below for the obligatory un-boxing photos, I apologise for the poor quality, my camera was out of juice so I took these with my iPhone 3G.
