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Macbook Air 13" 2012 VS Macbook Air 13" 2011 - Comparison
- Thread starter The Samurai
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Thanks for posting.
A minute difference for a 4 minute encode is significant, and the HD4000 is about 60% faster than the HD3000, and about 40% faster than the old NVidia 320M, so finally we get faster graphics than the 2010 Air, as well as faster processing.
A minute difference for a 4 minute encode is significant, and the HD4000 is about 60% faster than the HD3000, and about 40% faster than the old NVidia 320M, so finally we get faster graphics than the 2010 Air, as well as faster processing.
Its a Toshiba I believe - 'TS128E'. The last revisions (2011 MBA's) had a mixture of Samsung and Toshiba. Not sure if its the case this time too.
If so, the Samsungs were faster in the last one...
Downloading the app to test the speed for the SSD - will report soon.
I figured the cpu performance wouldn't be that much better, and the ssd performance also.
What I'm curious about is usb3 and the intel hd4000.
A test I would like to see is how good will it run while playing a light game(Portal 2, LoL, Minecraft, etc) and recording the screen with Quicktime or something else.
If it still lags like crazy as does my 2011 air, then its not worth upgrading to me.
EDIT: Btw, nice video!
No clue you were on these forums, you were one of the people that helped me get my air last year!
What I'm curious about is usb3 and the intel hd4000.
A test I would like to see is how good will it run while playing a light game(Portal 2, LoL, Minecraft, etc) and recording the screen with Quicktime or something else.
If it still lags like crazy as does my 2011 air, then its not worth upgrading to me.
EDIT: Btw, nice video!
No clue you were on these forums, you were one of the people that helped me get my air last year!
Great comparisons! Would it be possible to run a stress test or something similar to gauge how the fan noise compares? The new MBAs got the asymmetrical fan blades like the retina MBP so it would be interesting to see if the fan noise has gone down.
The Samsung SSD's (Flash...whatever, same difference. The controller is what matters) are generally faster than Toshiba, but of course SATA III is TONS faster than SATA II. It's twice the speed really but to bump up against the 6Gbps ceiling, you need at least two SATA III SSD's in RAID 0 in order to get actual 2x performance.
This is not new to Intel's CPU's. The 2011 MacBook Air (and Pro, iMac, etc.) all had Sandy Bridge CPU's, which were already capable of SATA III, but for some reason, Apple decided to use the - in comparison - totally lame SATA II ones.
This is not new to Intel's CPU's. The 2011 MacBook Air (and Pro, iMac, etc.) all had Sandy Bridge CPU's, which were already capable of SATA III, but for some reason, Apple decided to use the - in comparison - totally lame SATA II ones.
I figured the cpu performance wouldn't be that much better, and the ssd performance also.
What I'm curious about is usb3 and the intel hd4000.
A test I would like to see is how good will it run while playing a light game(Portal 2, LoL, Minecraft, etc) and recording the screen with Quicktime or something else.
If it still lags like crazy as does my 2011 air, then its not worth upgrading to me.
EDIT: Btw, nice video!
No clue you were on these forums, you were one of the people that helped me get my air last year!
I'd definitely like to see a light gaming test, specifically minecraft. That would be amazing
Fan and noise comparisons would be great.
Samurai -
Great videos!
What laptop are you using now for your main machine? You seemed fond of the rMPB as well.
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Thanks for answering this question. Now I and others need one more step with this. Ifixit noted that this Toshiba drive in the base model has a SANDFORCE controller which has been flagged as having problems with on-the-fly encryption like Filevault2. Could you encrypt your drive with Filevault2 and then run the SSD speed test again?
Fan & noise comparisons - video here:
New Retina MBP is my main laptop now. Selling of the MBA 2011. MBP retina is brilliant, screen and audio/speakers secure the deal for me.
SSD speeds are not all the same
I noticed the video on the SSD speeds and for certain, not all these SSDs are the same. At least not in the different sizes.
I bought the 2012 MBA 13" w/ 2.0GHz i7 upgrade, 8GB RAM upgrade and the 256 GB SSD.
On Disk Speed Test, I get 396.3 on Write and 446.9 on Read. That's a fair amount of difference from what's being seen on the 128GB SSD units. My system shows "APPLE SSD SM256E" so mine is a Samsung SSD.
Just thought others might want to know.
I noticed the video on the SSD speeds and for certain, not all these SSDs are the same. At least not in the different sizes.
I bought the 2012 MBA 13" w/ 2.0GHz i7 upgrade, 8GB RAM upgrade and the 256 GB SSD.
On Disk Speed Test, I get 396.3 on Write and 446.9 on Read. That's a fair amount of difference from what's being seen on the 128GB SSD units. My system shows "APPLE SSD SM256E" so mine is a Samsung SSD.
Just thought others might want to know.
Very useful video, thanks, hope you don't mind but I'd like to make a suggestion about the Lightroom test.. That is to select say 50 images and render the previews.
I found on my old PC laptop that rendering was a killer, and it fair zips along on my newer Laptop and given the current HDD in it is only 5400rpm I suspect a lot of this is down to the upgraded processor and 8gb RAM.
I'm not initially intending to use my MBA for Lightroom but you never know in the future, so it will be interesting to see.
I found on my old PC laptop that rendering was a killer, and it fair zips along on my newer Laptop and given the current HDD in it is only 5400rpm I suspect a lot of this is down to the upgraded processor and 8gb RAM.
I'm not initially intending to use my MBA for Lightroom but you never know in the future, so it will be interesting to see.
I respectfully disagree. There are a number of SSD's (OWC, Intel 520 Series, OCZ) that I am somewhat familiar with. I always do a ton of research before buying anything new, so I happen to have read tons of benchmarks and reviews about the aforementioned from various sources, including Anandtech, which is as good as it gets when it comes to highly accurate and unbiased reporting on a myriad of products.
It is perhaps important to note that all of the examples I listed are SandForce-based drives and when you google benchmarks that show both IOPS as well as sequential speeds, you will find that for whatever reason, the largest of each of the above mentioned drives (512GB and up) areall slower in both sequential reads/writes and IOPS (random 4K at varying queue depths).
Take the Intel 520 Series, for example, they come in 60GB, 120GB, 180GB, 240GB, and 480GB. The fastest ones are the 180GB and 240GB versions, while the highest capacity 480GB SSD suffers from a performance loss in sequential speeds (either that or IOPS, I can't remember now). The 60GB is the slowest one as far as both IOPS and sequential r/w's are concerned, while the 120GB is closer to the best performing 180GB/240GB versions, but significantly faster than the 60GB. No surprise there.
I looked into how the SATA III Samsung 830 SSD performs in general and I was curious to see if the above "rule" also applies here. I'm particularly interested in the 830, because the Flash storage that you will find in the new Retina MacBook Pro's is based on this very drive! It turns out that fortunately, this is not the case with this Samsung 830 SSD! Both the 256GB and 512GB capacities show the same speed and responsiveness, unlike the previous examples that I mentioned above.