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i5 '10 MBP vs. Haswell performance

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Pegamush

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 19, 2011
197
0
hi everyone, i'm an engineering student and about to start my master thesis.
my "old" 15" macbook pro is having logic board issues, and replacement at the apple store will cost me about 400€.
a friend of mine it interested in it, and would buy it from me even prior repairing (he would take care of that).
that said, for a "small" price difference i could get the new 13" rmbp with 8gb ram with 12% off the full price.

my current mac is an i5 2.4gh with dedicated nvidia 330m.
the new one would have also an i5 2.4ghz with iris graphics.

will i experience any speed improvement moving to haswell? let's not consider the ssd for now, i'm interested in raw performance to do some fem simulation (for which i will need a windows partition).

should i rather fix my old 15" and add an ssd to it?
i'm also concerned about screen estate, in my current macbook i have 1680x1050 resolution, how is windows dealing with the retina display?
if i'm back to a "simulated" 1200x800 i'd rather kill myself!

any comment and suggestion is well accepted!
 
There's no doubt the Haswell chips are quicker, but it's not a giant leap from your current i5. You will notice other benefits with Haswell such as better power efficiency, but again it's not a major as benchmarks suggest. Regarding the retina display, you can scale to 1680x1050 if you want. Everything looks great at that resolution.

Your current Mac would receive one hell of a performance boost if you installed a SSD, it may even feel like a new machine if you've been using a slow 5400RPM mechanical disk. However, with a 12% discount on a new machine and taking into account the cost of repair & the cost of purchasing the SSD it might be best to just get the new machine and cover some of the cost by selling your current machine to your mate.
 
The clock rate is almost the same. IPC is much better on Haswell compared to your old Arrendale. Still the difference isn't huge. 25%-50% more speed depending no how much an application can take advantage of newer instruction sets like AVX.
So the speed difference is there but it will not be very big. You'd need to get to the Quad Core of the 15" to see a big difference. Battery life and heat is much different though. It will stay much cooler at loads that used to push the fans on your old MBP already into higher gear.

I cannot understand how somebody can run 1440x900 Best for Retina on the 15" either. The More space setting works and on Windows most stuff works too. Some apps have issues (like Java) and some you can switch by activating XP like scaling in Win 8.1. DPI scaling can move very far in any direction but adding an external screen which requires a different DPI doesn't work so well. In theory independent DPI settings are possible and it resizes windows correctly. It still needs some tuning IMO.
OSX is easier because external screens just don't have the retina double DPI option.
Still 13" is much smaller, doesn't matter which resolution you run but the like 1440x900 setting is similar to your 1680x1050 screen.

I would just go for an SSD unless you want the battery life. Speed difference would not be big and retina is much less impressive if you come from an 1680x1050 screen then if you came from the ugly res of 1440x900.
 
to be clear, my actual 15" has a 500gb scorpio black (7200rpm) which i could use as secondary drive in case i put an ssd in the ODD tray. and that would also save me the need and cost to carry an external drive.

if i'm correct, the new 13" rmbp has an intel iris 5100, right? on the mega-benchmark-list in notebookcheck.net it says it's even faster than my dedicated nvidia 330m! is that true or, being it an integrated vga, has some downsides? (shared memory, etc)

i'm also familiar with the 1440x900 display of the 13" mba. and i find there's a huge difference from the 1680x1050 on the 15".
maybe i'm just too used to the 15" size that i'd suffer going back to 13", besides saving weight..
some thoughts?
 
Iris is in theory a lot faster than the 330M but your 15" has the advantage that the whole CPU performance is accessible while gaming. In Multiplayer at actually playable settings that helps quite a bit. Iris wouldn't outperform your system by much if at all. In some less CPU hungry and not too bandwidth hungry single player games Iris might be quite a bit (50%-80% in ideal scenarios) faster.

For any 2D stuff it won't matter. Even the Intel HD graphics does fine on media acceleration.
Don't by a new computer for the speed. An SSD will get you very close.
 
dusk007 said:
For any 2D stuff it won't matter. Even the Intel HD graphics does fine on media acceleration.
Don't by a new computer for the speed. An SSD will get you very close.
Click to expand...

ok thank you, i think i'd better save some money and stick with the bigger screen! i hope i can give it a new life with an ssd (ehmm... and a new logic board!!)
 
Pegamush said:
to be clear, my actual 15" has a 500gb scorpio black (7200rpm) which i could use as secondary drive in case i put an ssd in the ODD tray. and that would also save me the need and cost to carry an external drive.

if i'm correct, the new 13" rmbp has an intel iris 5100, right? on the mega-benchmark-list in notebookcheck.net it says it's even faster than my dedicated nvidia 330m! is that true or, being it an integrated vga, has some downsides? (shared memory, etc)

i'm also familiar with the 1440x900 display of the 13" mba. and i find there's a huge difference from the 1680x1050 on the 15".
maybe i'm just too used to the 15" size that i'd suffer going back to 13", besides saving weight..
some thoughts?
Click to expand...

Hi,

I have a mid-2010 15" i7 MBP (same model as yours but better processor). For a fact, the Intel HD Graphics is crap and the GT 330M isn't much better. I suffer from the GT 330M logic board issue so I'm forced to use the integrated GPU. My father has a Haswell 13" rMBP which I have used frequently. I would any day.

I already have an SSD in my laptop so that doesn't make much of a difference in day-to-day usage. I also already have 8 Gigs of RAM so no upgrade there either. It's the GPU performance (relative), the better CPU, the almost double battery life and the amazing screen that entice me. I have a Hi-Res display, so I scale the 13" to 1440*900, which gives the same effective DPI as my 15".

It takes half an hour to get used to the 13" display. After that, my MacBook looks huge. Besides, the 13" rMBP is extremely light and thin. At 1440*900, it's the ideal machine.

I would say go for it. If you're getting a good deal on your 15", now would be the time to trade.

Regards
Raptor
 
raptor402 said:
It takes half an hour to get used to the 13" display. After that, my MacBook looks huge. Besides, the 13" rMBP is extremely light and thin. At 1440*900, it's the ideal machine.
Click to expand...

do you have any experience under windows 7? how does the scaling works? i need a bootcamp partition to run some software for my thesis.
thanks for the reply
 
Pegamush said:
do you have any experience under windows 7? how does the scaling works? i need a bootcamp partition to run some software for my thesis.
thanks for the reply
Click to expand...

No experience with bootcamp on the rMBP, but I'm sure a quick google search will get you something.

Raptor
 
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