Macbook Pro 2010 : Core i5 Review (Gaming...)

Review Macbook Pro (Intel Core i5 2,4Ghz)



Introduction

I bought my first Macbook Pro in July 2009, I needed a new laptop for my work in university, with a professionnal look and with good finitions. The well known heat issue on my last Macbook Pro 2,8 Ghz disappointed me ! I sell it quickly to get few months later an Alienware M11x. Too little laptop and too slow processor I wanted to change it again. It was on the 26 april 2010 and the new Macbook pro came out, I choose the following configuration:

# 2.4GHz Intel Core i5
# 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x2GB
# 320GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm
# SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
# MacBook Pro 15-inch Glossy Widescreen Display
# Nvidia Geforce GT 330M 256 Mo GDDR3
# Clavier rétro-éclairé (Français) & Guide de l'utilisateur

For a total of 1799 euros. (Belgium)

A Closer Look

I think video talks more than words so enjoy this little video with poor quality taken from my next gen ipod nano(5th) :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s4XgNBN2Gk

-2 USB (2.0)
-Ethernet (10/100/1000)
-Firmwire 800
-Lecteur carte SD
-Input microphone
-output audio

Few pictures taken after the unboxing :









Mac OS X

The most beautiful thing about Mac OS X is the capicity of customising, here is my setup :



You can see all my desktop here : http://tuxchemistry.deviantart.com/


Performance

Here is the main point ! I created a 80 Go partition to install bootcamp and windows 7 64 bits. My Nvidia drivers are the 197.16 one.

A first run in 3D Mark 2006(@1280x800) without any overclocks(stock score) :



Nothing special a pretty mid range score. I decided to overclock a bit the GPU with these settings :

Core : 700
Shaders : 1560
Memory : 1000

The score goes from mid range score to pretty high range score :



Awesome 9000 points on a non gaming machine ! To confirm this result I decided to run few games.

Resident Evil 5 - All on High(Except Shadows) @ 1280x720



Street Fighter 4 - All on High with anisotropy 16x @ 1280x720




Devil May Cry 4 - All on High @ 1280x720




The Last Remnant @ 1280x720




Borderlands - All on High(Except Dynamic Shadows) @ 1280x720


I played the first scene until the meeting with Dr Zed. Recorded FPS with FRAPS.

Frames: 7032 - Time: 128227ms - Avg: 54.840 - Min: 41 - Max: 63





Mass Effect 2 - All on High(Except Dynamics Shadow)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FrKRtjEQAI

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl




Conclusion

Well a really good gaming, working, ... laptop. Apple produces a very good laptop with very good capacity in term of gaming.

+
- Battery (5h30 DVD)
- Performance
- Workmanship
- Silent
- Temperature
- ...


-

-Price !!!!



Thank you for reading

 

Im a newbie to mac, care to teach me how to customize your mac desktop?
Like what kind of program did you use to make it similar to the desktop you have on the screenshot. Thanks
Love the msn enbedding on the desktop + the music player on the bottom left corner of the desktop.

 

For the music try a little program called : Bowtie (Really nice, you will find many themes on DeviantArt)

Well to customize all the desktop I needed a porting font (TTF -> TTC) of Calibri, the menubar is a theme modded by a friend (Search Vitae theme snow leopard on DeviantArt), It takes many hours to do that, just like me try to read on website

 

Very nice review. Thanks for sharing.

 

excellent work.

couple of questions for you:

1.) what driver are you using? the driver I'm using always crashes when I OC to 700. a 33% increase over stock is stable for my drivers (multiply gpu, memory and shader by 33%).

I'm not sure if the driver is crashing because the card can't handle it, or if it's simply the driver itself. if another driver will prove more stable, I'd like to try it.

2.) Are you able to save your OC settings upon reboot? when I reboot, I have to reset my GPU OC settings. it's not a big deal (45 seconds, tops), but if I can set it once and have it stay, I'd rather do that.


meanwhile, I've been doing all my game testing at the full 1920x1200 for *all* games. will be reporting results for my system soon.

 

Those 3Dmark06 SM2.0 and 3.0 scores put the GPU at ~25-30% faster than the 9600M GT at stock which is a nice little performance bump.

Those OC scores are even nicer.

 

electrosoft, I had a 9600M in my old Vaio...330M beats it soundly even before the overclocking.

 

For 9600M's, they can be not only differently clocked but also come in DDR2 and DDR3 flavors. Lower clocked DDR2 9600M's are much slower than their DDR3 cousin.

I'm comparing the results to the 9600M GT DDR3 I achieved in an MSI 1722 w/ a QX9300 Quad Core. Either way, a Core 2 or i5/i7 is bottlenecked by a 9600M and for 3Dmark06, you definitely want to focus on the SM2.0/3.0 scores and not the overall score as the CPU really pumps up the score.

Or run Vantage GPU for a more modern reflection as 3Dmark06 is really outdated overall.

 

!

1) The best driver I found is : 197.16 official. I tried the new 257.XX series but get a lower score on 3D Mark 2006.

2) No, i am not able to do that ! I don't know why, i need to state it every time i restart.

 

sweet. I'm using the best driver, then. thanks for the confirmation.

 

So figure the 330m is a DX11 8700m GT.
(if you normalize the processor score or use the SM scores)

Its not bad... but kinda pales in comparison to what was available.
Even a 2-yr-old 9800mGS would have doubled the performance and was very easily fit into 15-inch laptops 2 years ago.

 

I own an Imac, and I am happy with it, but I must admit that it has been more annoying than I thought it would be, to bootcamp every time I wanted to game.

I'm so much of a gamer, that it became a really big thing for me, and I stopped gaming entirely on my Imac. With that being said, Bootcamp have been working great for me.
If your okay with dual booting for gaming, it's perfect, IMO. But I only have the experience of an Imac user.


They should have put the 330m in the 13'' version!

 

They also should put Core-i5's in the MBP 13"... but the C2D works well for my needs anyway.

 

thats why you play Mac games.. or Windows games that can run in OSX without using Windows...

 

I would like to see some pics of heat and fps monitoring program while you gaming. Can you please give me some next time you game?
BTW, what is your comment with this upgrade from 2009 to 2010 model.
I am really thinking about buying a macbook (just because I want it, I already have a desktop i7 gaming at home and dont find much need for a laptop) and my current laptop is still good enough for websurfing since I dont game on the go (I will sell the laptop if I decided to buy a macbook pro)

 

Already done look at the ME2 video showing FPS. For the heat here is what you are looking for after 2 hours of ME2 :



This upgrade give me more power, a better life battery (5h30 watching DVD), a better trackpad(inertial).

 

And another customization

 

what does that one do other than make the apple red?

 

I think i understand your question so, Change have been made on the font (in the menubar) i am able to use the payware font : NeutraFace(needed a port to snowleopard => Convertion from TTF to TTC), the shape of the dock has changed, ... many little things

 

oh okay. cool.

 

thanks for this thread.. found ya through google =) good stuff...

 

For those of you that are interested, I found a video of Dragon Age: Origins on the MacBook Pro 15" (2.66 GHz i7, 512 MB GT 330M). He's playing it through Bootcamp on Windows 7 64-bit.

YouTube - Dragon Age

Hope this helps!

 

so there is no overheat problems in windows mode?

 

The only two "Mac" Games I own are Fable and Jedi Knight Academy, and they both run horrible compared to PC. I decided that, that was enough.

Blizzards games have been the only exception so far, that seems to run well on OSX. But that's a sad thing if you are a big gamer.

 

Team Fortress 2 runs smoothly for me on my 13 incher. Obviously not on highest or native settings.

 

It should though. Not nicely optimized

How well does it run in bootcamp?

 

I haven't installed it on Windows 7 Bootcamp yet. I probably will once I have the patience to work with Windows again.

 

I think you will be shocked over the gaming performance improvements in boot camp.

 

Yay now I'm curious and exciteddd!!!!

 

A video of the MacBook Pro 15" (2.66 GHz i7, 512 MB NVIDIA GT 330M) playing Bioshock for OS X at native resolution and highest possible settings for it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QpscdBe55g&feature=channel.

Don't know how many FPS he was getting, but it seemed pretty smooth to me.

Hope this helps!

 

Great Review, one question Tux: What software are you using to overclock the GPU?

Thanks

 

Any input on playing starcraft 2?

 

I would really like to see some actual numbers from the i5 and i7 2010 models on starcraft 2 thanks

 

full resolution for me (1920x1200), mix of medium and high settings. never below 30fps.

should be even smoother for the 15" ers, which have significantly less pixels to fuel.

and if you bootcamp, you can OC your windows 330m drivers for even more performance. I have almost everything on High under Windows and get butter smooth performance.

 

wow! you might just have convinced me to there

 

Wow, this runs way cooler than my Macbook Pro 17! Mine hits CPU 99C and GPU 96C while on MW2. But the fans only go to 5000rpm so far. Maybe after a while they'll go to 6000rpm.

Excellent review, makes me want a 15" i5

 

So does the i5 run a lot cooler than the i7 macbook pro 15" ??

 

They should run the same temperature, they're both 35 Watt ships of the same gen.

 

Cool, thanks for the info. macbook pro is suuuch an investment, specially when you haven't had a mac notebook before so i wanna make sure there aren't too many problems and if any then that there is a solution (or replacement) too.

 

+1 to the Macbook Pro being an investment... But I have decided I am biting the bullet tomorrow and bringing home the i7 15" MBP. I am going to stick with the stock screen resolution though (only because its my understanding the apple store doesn't offer the higher res versions)

 

I am going to buy it in the apple online store, there you can do what ever you want to customize it. how ever i am sticking with the 1400x900 screen as its a really nice resolution for both graphical work and a bit of gaming. The higher res will stress the small 330m a lot more.

 

Yeah I switched it up. hard to pay more for the high res Macbook pro 15 than what the macbook pro 17 costs. I ended up purchasing on amazon.com for under 2099 including overnight shipping. Good deal i felt.

 

you check out Mac Connetion's deals? they have $300 off some models they are carrying.

Mac Connection - Apple Super Sale