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How's my current laptop compared to the 13" Air?

I

iLive

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 3, 2012
115
55
Denmark
I have a 4-5 year old laptop, and I am thinking about a MacBook Air. I don't know that much about graphic cards and processors, so if I tell my current laptop's specs, can you tell me if it's worse or better than the base model of MacBook Air 13"?

Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU P8400 @ 2.26GHz
4 GB RAM (3 GB useable)
 
my 2011 air blows my 2010 mbp out of the water 3 times over. so it would wipe the streets with ur p8600
 
My 2008 MacBook is super slow compared to my new MacBook Air. The Air is heaps faster and a pleasure to use. I'm very glad to decided to upgrade.
 
I upgraded from a 15" 2008 MBP with specs almost identical to yours (my CPU was 2.4ghz) to a 2011 13" MBA i5 1.6ghz 4GB/256GB. The MBA is almost twice as fast for CPU bound tasks and maybe 4x or 5x faster for disk access.

You will notice a huge difference in speed, especially with the 2012 models which are even faster than mine.
 
Geek bench for the 2.26 P8400 is about 3200. Geek bench for the baseline 1.8 i5 in the 2012 13" Air is about 6200. The Air is roughly double the CPU power. Very significant upgrade.

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/search?q=P8400&commit=Search

http://www.primatelabs.com/blog/2012/06/macbook-air-pro-benchmarks/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+primatelabsblog+%28Primate+Labs+Blog%29
 
kobyh15 said:
Geek bench for the 2.26 P8400 is about 3200. Geek bench for the baseline 1.8 i5 in the 2012 13" Air is about 6200. The Air is roughly double the CPU power. Very significant upgrade.
Click to expand...

And the speed difference between the MBA's flash memory and the OP's hard drive is even more significant.

iLive, I assume your old laptop is running Windows. Will you be running Windows on a new MBA?

It will smoke your old laptop on Windows in bootcamp, but in virtual machines you'd be fine for processor-intensive things, but not for games.
 
ihonda said:
my 2011 air blows my 2010 mbp out of the water 3 times over. so it would wipe the streets with ur p8600
Click to expand...
That's exaggerated...overly. If it is the 13" model than the specs are nearly the same except for the ssd (but you can upgrade the hdd to ssd on the 13" MBP model). If it is the 15" model than forget it, the 330M videocard in it blows the Intel HD3000 out of the water by miles. All of the 2010 MBP models have faster cpus and can be upgraded to 8GB of memory whereas the 2011 can not (4GB max). If you want something that really blows the mbp out of the water then get the MBP Retina.

The difference between the Air and the 13" Pro is getting smaller with every new Air it seems. The 2012 model can be upgraded to 8 which will be enough for the coming years for most of the users, even power users that use things like virtualisation. It now also has the ability to use Gbit ethernet anywhere because of the thunderbolt adapter. The memory on the Pro can be upgraded to 16GB and you can have the same ssd options as the Air. In the end it's only the memory and the optical drive that really sets the 13" Pro apart from the Air. I quite like where it is going: portable (read: less bulky) yet very powerful and capable notebooks.
 
I have almost the same specs as you, with the 9600GT, 4GB (333mhz) RAM and a slightly slower C2D-processor. I also have a slow, old 5400 rpm harddrive.

I'm going to buy the 256GB 13 inch Air with added 8GB ram, and have tried to find out how much faster it will be by checking different benchmarks like Geekbench and PassMark.

For my specs:

Processor: 2,5x faster
Graphics: 0,7x faster (not bad against a dedicated graphics card)
RAM: 4,8x faster (as in clock speed)
SSD: 4,5x faster (writing)

Screen: 1,25x more pixels
Weight: 3,75x lighter (Haha, I know...)

To sum it up you get a badass computer in a small package!
Jeg tror ikke du kommer til å bli skuffet! ;)
 
Last edited:
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