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2011 MBP 13" High End Model Discussion

MUBiomed

MUBiomed

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 24, 2010
408
53
Before I begin I am not trolling as I have seen everyone raging this afternoon over the HD 3000 being worse than the 320M.

I am not interested in getting a 15" (unless I absolutely have to) based on the portability I require from a laptop. I would like to use it in clamshell mode at home and then take it with me to class/hospital when I need to. I will be running a 22" LED Dell external monitor while I am at home. I do play SCII (recreationally) and a few Steam Games but mainly do Office/Browsing/iTunes/Citrix/dabble in Dreamweaver & CS4 Suite.

The question is whether the 2.7Ghz i7 will help alleviate the strain on the new 2011 MBP trying to do these things (mainly the games) and will I even be able to play SCII on an external monitor with decent FPS or will the 15" be necessary (I realize I will not be on ultra high settings)?

And for all of the detractors shouting for people to go with a MBA 13", I need more storage than that (256GB) and do not want to carry around an external drive with my ultraportable (which would not be so ultraportable anymore).

Regards
 
Also should note that I will not be keeping the MBA in the sig for those who might think that.
 
Same position

I am in the same position as you, and I think your best bet is to wait a few days (maybe week) and see what the reviewers report.

I have a feeling that the reason the 13" didn't get a resolution upgrade is to enable decent performance for the intel video card. If this is true, then I wouldn't hold out hope of it being able to drive a larger display to play SC2. However it should run fine on the 13" screen.
 
I think the high end 13" is amazing. And a great value too. i7 for $1500?! Whadddup!!!:D
 
If you really want to game, you do honestly want discrete graphics, the 15"

I would be surprised if the base model does not already bottleneck the I7. However it is possible this is not the case at the lower resolution featured on the 13"
 
I think I will go ahead and order it and see how it performs on the external monitor. In the worst case scenario I can return it to Apple and go up to the discreet graphics in the 15". I was hoping to find more people who are putting the i7 13" through it's paces tonight. No discreet graphics in the 13" is a bummer...not everyone has room to sit a hulking 15" everywhere they go.
 
I am also considering which of the two MBP 13 models I shall go for. I am putting in a SSD-disk no matter what, but is the processor upgrade worth it? Is the i7 much better than the i5?
 
Less than 2 hours ago i ordered the high-end MPB 13" with 8Gb of Ram since i wanna run Win Xp in Parallel for some scientific programs. And yes i think i7 is definitely better than i5 since it has higher clock in turbo mode both for the Cpu and the Gpu, and it has also 1 additional Mb of cache. I hope the HD3000 is not so bad to allow me to play Anno 1404 (Dawn of discovery in the US) without problems on the 13" monitor; the game is only a strategic and the GPU does not have to do hard claculations like in real time FPS so i hope it goes sweetie.
I did not order a 15" since i wanna a portable device and i dont wanna a computer heating like a bread oven, like the 15's first tests are showing.
 
aiuL said:
I am also considering which of the two MBP 13 models I shall go for. I am putting in a SSD-disk no matter what, but is the processor upgrade worth it? Is the i7 much better than the i5?
Click to expand...

Was wondering the same thing.
Is the i7 worth the extra money?
Will it perform better in gaming you think? (I know the 13" isn't for gaming, but anyway)..
Or will it be a better move to order the low-end and some additional ram?
 
I plan on using this as my main machines so I cannot go SSD (unless I drop bank on a 750GB SSD :eek:). I might upgrade to a 7200 but that would be all. I have yet to find any good benchmarks regarding the stock high end 13" since most people running gaming benchmarks got an SSD put in it. I am also concerned about driving the monitor at 1920x1080 when at home since that is where I planned to play the games mainly (with a full keyboard and mouse setup). Anyone seen any videos or reviews to this effect?
 
For 99.9999% of people getting an i7 over the i5 wont mean anything. Everything is virtually the same. Even if you do need raw cpu power, its so minuscule the price hike ain't worth it.
 
Totally new here -- both to Macrumors and to owning a Mac... But, I picked up the cheaper 13in MBP yesterday and installed SC2 last night. I'm pretty terrible at the game, but I can't get better if my I can't play, so I wanted to see how that'd go... I was pleasantly surprised. I played a 1v1 on low against my boyfriend, I was getting over 100fps when I was building my army, that dropped to about 30-40 fps when he roflstomped me with a giant army (Since I'm a newb and had been hiding in my base while he took the whole map... but that was a LOT of units). However, this was without an external monitor -- too lazy to unplug it from my other machine.

Just thought I'd chip in. Hope this helped! Back to trying to figure out OS X!
 
question. my main for my computer for office work, but i do photography work on the side. at times i'll edit a whole batch of photos. would the 13" be capable of doing or would the last year mackbook pro i5 doing better?
 
Picked up a 13" I7 at the Bath Apple store today, suits my needs (non-gaming, i've got an Xbox for that. ) Geekbenches almost exactly twice my old 2.66 2010 13".
2011 13" 2.7 geekbench - 7524
2010 13" 2.66 geekbench - 3692
 
I'm in a similar boat:

Uses: school/photography/videography, portability, clamshell mode to external when at home.

I just hope this can hang with my video editing. I figured if my old HP core duo could run Adobe Premiere CS5 and Adobe Photoshop CS4 decently, then it should be fairly cake for this i7 13".

The only speculation is that Final Cut Pro (FCP) is "not" supposed to work for 13". Apple store reps were confident the 2011 i7 13" would be able to run it just fine though.
 
the processing power is not i'm worried about its more of the graphics card for me. in photoshop that is were everything bottles necks.
 
Funkymonk said:
For 99.9999% of people getting an i7 over the i5 wont mean anything. Everything is virtually the same. Even if you do need raw cpu power, its so minuscule the price hike ain't worth it.
Click to expand...

This. On the 13" it always seemed silly to me to pay the money for the little bump in performance of the high end model. Save that money and put it in RAM or HD.
 
Funkymonk said:
For 99.9999% of people getting an i7 over the i5 wont mean anything. Everything is virtually the same. Even if you do need raw cpu power, its so minuscule the price hike ain't worth it.
Click to expand...

Wise words here.

"But it's dual core." I'm sick of seeing this! What the hell are over half the people here DOING that you need to stress more than 2 powerful cores anyway? Are you all studio artists/editors or professional photographers or videographers? Why does everyone need a workstation...
 
ddoolin0 said:
Wise words here.

"But it's dual core." I'm sick of seeing this! What the hell are over half the people here DOING that you need to stress more than 2 powerful cores anyway? Are you all studio artists/editors or professional photographers or videographers? Why does everyone need a workstation...
Click to expand...

Actually they are geekbenchers and yes they do need 4 cores what can You do with 2 cores like 6000 geekbenck points? That's not cool at all. 4 cores best mac geekbench laptop score ever 11000 wait till I tell my wife.
 
I picked a i7 13in up from microcenter around a few hours ago. Installed a few things and started testing.

Geekbench (32-bit): 6872

Cinebench
OpenGL: 11.24
CPU: 2.96
 
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As you can see from my sig I broke down and went for the 15" model based on the reviews/benchmarks I am seeing. So far I am happy with it, as encoding has been very quick with handbrake and SCII has been playing very well on Med settings even on my 1920x1080 external monitor. My geekbench score hovers around 8800. I have not experienced any of the heat related problems (yet at least) that many have been complaining about but time will tell.

My only complaint is that there is a very small chip on the front edge of the lid that was there when I unboxed it. I bought it at Best Buy so I can obviously return it in 14 days but I can already see the look on the teenage girl working the return counter when I tell her why I want a different one :eek:
 
ddoolin0 said:
Wise words here.

"But it's dual core." I'm sick of seeing this! What the hell are over half the people here DOING that you need to stress more than 2 powerful cores anyway? Are you all studio artists/editors or professional photographers or videographers? Why does everyone need a workstation...
Click to expand...

They don't. Its just the good old desire humans have to own the best possible ;)
 
Yes some of us really need the horsepower.

I'm sort of desperate for it actually. :D

Question: for a 'realtime' , moderate resources task, do think it's possible that the higher clocked dual-core could actually be faster than a 2.2GHZ quad?

I'm not at all sure about this, and I guess it depends on the app that is running (obviously). But i'm very curious about this.

But apparently, the quad 2.2 turbo boosts to the same freq as the 2.7GHZ, which might make it just as fast. But I don't know when the boost kicks in. I would imagine that's a gray area and perhaps imprecise.
 
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