How Fast Are the brand new MacBook Airs? [Benchmarks]

We’re taking our time with the brand new MacBook Airs, searching for out once you can actually matter on these wonder wedges to serve as your main machine. But some early benchmarks are already out, and here’s how they give the impression of being:

The Benchmarks:

MacWorld ran an intensive Speedmark 6.5 benchmark on all four standard new MacBook Air models.

The Results:

As to be expected, MacWorld found that the recent 1.86GHz MacBook Airs trounced the older Airs across the board, grabbing an overall score of 108 compared to the older 1.86GHz MBA’s 54. The cast state drives helped the most recent MBAs scorch their predecessors in drive-intensive tests, and even processor-heavy tests involving iTunes encoding and Photoshop were snappier on the most recent Airs, despite their having an identical 1.86GHz processor.

But more surprisingly is that the 13″ MacBook Air outperformed the Core2Duo 13″ MacBook Pro in many tests, edging it out overall with a score of 108 compared to the MBP’s 106. The recent MBAs were 59% faster than the 13″ MacBook Pro in file duplication tests, 43% faster in file unzipping, and roughly 21% faster in MacWorld’s Call of Duty test.

When it came to video encoding, though, the 13″ MacBook Pro won out: it was 20% faster than the recent 13″ Air and 43% faster than the 11″ . And while the most recent MacBook Air’s flash storage kept it apace with the 15″ Core i5 MacBook Pro in drive tests, when it came to tests that took benefit of HyperThreading, the Core i5 MacBook Pro was twice as fast as the 13″ MBA and three time as fast as the 11″ MBA.

In their review of the 11″ MacBook Air, PC Mag benchmarked the MBA against its ultraportable PC counterparts and found that while it was impressive for 3D gaming, it fell behind in different other categories.

The reason Apple chose to stay with a Core 2 Duo was so that it will possibly take pleasure in a stronger graphics environment, specifically Nvidia’s integrated one. The Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics chip is the MacBook Air’s one redeeming feature on the subject of performance. Though it’s not the sort of laptop you’d bring to a LAN party, it’s a far better gaming solution than Intel’s integrated graphics-the type found inside the Asus Ul20FT-A1, Acer AS1830T-3721, and Toshiba T235-S1350. Its 3DMark 06 scores (4,569 and 3,984) were at the least three-times better than anything of the sphere. It was the one laptop that can handle our 3D intensive gaming demos, Crysis and Lost Planet 2.

But overall, they concluded:

the [11" ] MacBook Air is absolutely not the zippiest laptop. It took almost four times (23 minutes 23 seconds) as long to encode a video than the Toshiba T235-S1350 (6:24). Because the Photoshop CS5 test is memory intensive, the MacBook Air (14:03) trailed against the Asus UL20FT-A1 (9:31) and Toshiba T235-S1350 (11:28).

The Takeaway

The 13″ MacBook Air can probably replace your main machine; the 11″ MacBook not really. The 13″ MacBook Air can go toe-to-toe and in many cases outperform the current 13″ MacBook Pro, but while you’re going to be doing heavy video work and aren’t afraid to move to 15″ , the Core i5 MacBook Pros still have the appropriate performance. The 11″ MBA isn’t any slouch, nevertheless it’s not nearly as convincing as a prime-machine contender as the 13″ , especially for multimedia-heavy tasks.

Look for our full take on the brand new MacBook Airs soon. [ MacWorld , PCMag ]

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This post is tagged: call of duty test, flash storage, graphics environment, intensive tests, ultraportable pc, video encoding