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2015 RMBP Experiences?

F

Fransenson

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 30, 2015
5
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Title basically says it all. I'm about to sell my late 2012 27" iMac and get my hands on a mid 2015 15" RMBP without dGPU.

I've got some questions some people here are hopefully able to answer:

How is the overall OS performance with the base 15" model (mid 2015) right now?

Is battery life an issue with some non-intense work? (Basically programming projects)

How is the iGPU performing with some light gaming? Maybe Diablo 3 or similar?

Has someone already tried the El Capitan Beta on it?

The rmbp will be my main Mac and there will be a dedicated gaming machine at my place.
I want to use it mainly for development, some Pixelmator fiddling and university stuff.
Also playing some not too demanding games when not at home would be nice.

I also consider waiting for the upcoming Skylake refresh but as no one knows when this will hit the shelves it's a tough decision whether I should wait or not. Main reason to wait would be the stronger iGPU plus some battery improvements. But will this upgrade be worth waiting? Does it make a huge difference for what I will use the laptop for?

I'm looking forward to your experiences with the latest machine!


tl;dr: wtb 15" rmbp without dGPU - how is it? Is the (possibly longish) waiting time for Skylake worth it?
 
Overall OS performance is great.

Battery Life is great even under intensive workloads. You won't hit 9 hours running video encoding of course but 3-4 hours of intensive work is doable.

The iGPU isn't good for gaming unless you turn the resolution down to 720p or lower. Don't expect to have a good gaming experience on this notebook.

I've installed El Capitan, it works great. Just make sure you do a Time Machine backup before you try the beta and do not allow El Capitan to access that backup as it will make it unreadable by Yosemite so you cannot revert (found this out the hard way).

Overall I think it's a great laptop. Well worth the sticker price, keep in mind I bought the one with the M370X but I can and do run it on the iGPU most of the time (it has automatic graphics switching) so I have valid opinions on the iGPU performance in OS X.
 
The base can run the current OS very well. It has very good battery life IMO and it can game ok on lower resolutions. However calling it an upgrade is debateable.

The 15in has a new CPU but depending on what config you have it could be as little as 1% to as much as about 20% better in multicore tasks.

Next is the GPU. The base 15in has a Iris Pro 5200 which has a 2% gain in performance from the 660m in the base 2012 27in iMac. But if it's the 675mx its 71% slower and if it's the 680mx the 5200 is 180% slower.

Ha the Hard drive will be a lot faster but it may not be an "upgrade". It will however be portable and that goes a long way.
 
Thank you for the replies!

My 2012 iMac is nearly the top model with the 680MX GTX, 16GB RAM and the i7 upgrade.
I don't consider the rmbp as a huge performance gain over my desktop beast, but I don't want to actually drop a huge chunk of performance for mobility and a display with higher pixel density.

Gaming on the rmbp is not a primary thing as I will have a dedicated windows gaming machine alongside the MacBook. But occasionally I'd like to fire up a game at low-mid settings and lower than native resolutions just to kill some time while traveling or something similar.

I am still not sure about Skylake.
iGPU performance will be quite a bit better and it will be more energy efficient. If one could know that the update will come in October / November this year (maybe with an announcement along with the El Capitan release?) I'd wait for sure, but waiting until the next WWDC in June 2016 is not really an option.

I don't know if I feel good with buying a recently "updated" rmbp that basically still uses a CPU from 2 years ago with slightly higher clock rates. That's why I ask for your experiences with the machine.
 
Skylake will not really boost CPU performance much. Most leaked benchmarks are showing minimal increases in IPC (Instructions Per Clock). Intel's main focus with it is the iGPU. It will increase graphics performance a lot.

I wouldn't wait, I didn't and I'm very happy. I know it's frustrating buying "old" technology but when you look past the numbers and actually use the product you'll find it gives an incredible experience and is very fast. The combination of the high speed quad core i7's the PCIe SSD and El Capitan (which gives a very noticeable graphical boost to the iGPU in OS X) results in a very snappy machine.

Since having mine I have not had to wait any any loading screens or seen the beach ball mouse cursor at all. Everything opens and closes instantly and the overall experience is excellent. I have literally no complaints about performance.

Also something I didn't mention before is the fan noise, the fans on this are very quiet 0-2000 RPM they are inaudible, 3,000 they start to be heard, 4,000-6,000 they are audible but with a deep hum and not a high pitched whine like the older MacBook Pro's used to have. It doesn't annoy me like the older ones did.
 
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Quu said:
Skylake will not really boost CPU performance much. Most leaked benchmarks are showing minimal increases in IPC (Instructions Per Clock). Intel's main focus with it is the iGPU. It will increase graphics performance a lot.

I wouldn't wait, I didn't and I'm very happy. I know it's frustrating buying "old" technology but when you look past the numbers and actually use the product you'll find it gives an incredible experience and is very fast. The combination of the high speed quad core i7's the PCIe SSD and El Capitan (which gives a very noticeable graphical boost to the iGPU in OS X) results in a very snappy machine.

Since having mine I have not had to wait any any loading screens or seen the beach ball mouse cursor at all. Everything opens and closes instantly and the overall experience is excellent. I have literally no complaints about performance.

Also something I didn't mention before is the fan noise, the fans on this are very quiet 0-2000 RPM they are inaudible, 3,000 they start to be heard, 4,000-6,000 they are audible but with a deep hum and not a high pitched whine like the older MacBook Pro's used to have. It doesn't annoy me like the older ones did.
Click to expand...

I would just like to add my voice to everything Quu is saying.
Got the 15" with the AMD GPU and it is just superbly zippy; a machine wot goes fast, if you will.
 
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