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i5 2.0ghz vs i7 2.4ghz on nTB Big Difference?
- Thread starter MBX
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It will make a big difference in your credit card balance, as to whether or not that's worth it depends entirely on your needs and your work. Does the time saved when it's all added up make it worthwhile?
I have the base i5 2.0ghz and sometimes when I play YouTube video and do expose of all windows it feels choppy and not butter smooth. Like dropping frames of the UI animation.
I wonder if it would be butter smooth with a i7 2.4ghz.
I also have my screen resolution set to highest "More Space", could it be that and actually the iris' GPU and not CPU?
I wonder if it would be butter smooth with a i7 2.4ghz.
I also have my screen resolution set to highest "More Space", could it be that and actually the iris' GPU and not CPU?
well the turbo speed is about 10% difference but as others have said unless you max out your CPU a lot you'll probably never notice a difference. You would probably want a more powerful machine if that was the case anyway.
I really doubt it. Choppiness is unfortunately present on even a lot of high end Macs. While not everyone seems to experience/notice the problem to the same degree (probably due to use case), it's definitely not restricted to slower machines.
I've heard that it's related to the way that Apple draws the interface and that the underlying issues which cause choppiness have been resolved in iOS 10, so we can only hope the same fixes will be implemented in the next revision of macOS.
(Just for reference I used to experience chopiness at times on the 4Ghz/295MX 2014 Retina iMac I used to own....)
Oh thanks for explaining.
I see now. And hope Apple does improve this in future. Maybe in the upcoming 10.13 later this year.
When you do expose, the OS needs to redraw all the windows (and AFAIK, OS X does it in real time, so when you have expose on, ALL apps actively redraw everything, that is a lot of CPU work! yes, CPU, the GPU doesn't really care). The problem is not drawing per se, but the time needed to wake up an application which was currently in the background. This is also very application-dependent: a well-coded application should perform these actions very quickly.
There are some things that Apple could do to improve this, but all of them have drawbacks:
- have all apps active all the time (a real no go, kills performance and battery)
- keep a copy of every last window image in the resident VRAM, so that you can go into expose immediately (would need a lot of RAM that is wasted most of the time)
- display a placeholder image immediately and replace it by the actual window image when the app reacts to the redraw call — would result in fast animations but be potentially ugly
The only "performance degradation" I ever see on my 2016 nTB base MBP is using Expose. So would the 2017 models (the 15w TDP or 28w TDP CPUs?) improve upon this?
Nope. You will see the same thing on latest 15" MBP with 560 GPU.
@leman is right on this one.
But apparently, Metal 2.0 should help, so wait for High Sierra
Nope. You will see the same thing on latest 15" MBP with 560 GPU.
@leman is right on this one.
But apparently, Metal 2.0 should help, so wait for High Sierra
Good news, I installed High Sierra today on my 13" base MBP and Expose is now perfectly smooth!
I have the base 2.0ghz i5 and feel more than happy with the performance. It feels smooth and fast in everyday use, even using Adobe programs. I don't really do video editing though, so I can't comment on the performance in that regard. If I was paying extra for a "better" version then I think I would plump for the memory upgrade over the processor.