Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Max Yuryev tests the MBP 15" CPUs: 2.2 vs 2.6 vs 2.9
- Thread starter sennomulo
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Yes I agree, harddrive space is the one thing most people end up wishing they had picked more of. It's not upgradable so 512Gb makes for a better choice.
Since you also indicated your son might play Fortnite on it, you'll have to dedicate a partition to Bootcamp with Windows 10 as well, which takes up some extra space. The reason is that MacOs is currently not a viable alternative for playing Fortnite with consistent frame rates. Bootcamp can get good results after tweaking, but under MacOs you're framerate will drop in the 10's and lower from time to time.
The 2.6 also includes the 560X GPU right? You'll get better graphics performance from that as well.
Last edited:
My suggestion is to get something with the 560X, simply because of games. I'm sure that you will be absolutely satisfied with the base CPU.
BAREFEATS.COM
He hasn't fully updated the page yet...I can see he is working on it now
Are you referring to this comparison?
August 1st, 2018 -- 2018 MacBook Pro 2.9GHz i9 versus the 2.6GHz and 2.2GHz i7
That seems to link to 2018 vs 2017 comparison.
Its in here, the link on his homepage is wrong for some reason:
http://barefeats.com/macbook_pro_2018_i9_vs_i7.html
http://barefeats.com/macbook_pro_2018_i9_vs_i7.html
Some tests seem to stragely also have it slower than the 2.2! I don't know what to make of it or how accurate the testing is?
I get the 2.2GHz difference because that one has a less powerful GPU, so it has more room to boost the CPU in those cases. But just don't understand why Max is saying it's a con and Rob is saying its faster.
I can't wait for my i7 to arrive so I can test the damn thing myself.
As we have been saying, every benchmark that causes thin and light machines to hit their thermal limits performs in the same ballpark. I'm really surprised intelligent adults can't figure this out, even people who claim to be computer experts (rather, clickbait masters).
But if your machine is not hitting thermal limits because you are using apps that are suitable for thin and light computers, then the results are like this:
Thin and light machines are not supposed to be for high power hours long CG and 4K/8K rendering. Nobody does that in the professional fields.
I don't know I'd call the 2015 'thick and heavy', though the 2016 is definitely impressively thin and light...
I don’t even wanna know how you would describe the thickness of the pre-2012 models...
But I would wonder how the current crops of i9 would perform if given the pre-2012 form factor.
I definitely don’t want to take the pre-2012 15-inch MBPs with me (I had a 2010 MBP, a 2012 rMBP, and now a 2018 MBP, all 15-inch). The current 15-inch is quite portable in contrary.I don’t even wanna know how you would describe the thickness of the pre-2012 models...
But I would wonder how the current crops of i9 would perform if given the pre-2012 form factor.
The way I see it is the thin and light is for portability as a primary objective. If you need to number crunch for hours on end you get something like a Helios which is far less portable but can sustain a clockspeed of 4.8GHz underload. Funny thing is you won’t be number crunching at 4.8GHz while moving so it’s not a big deal if it’s why you got it. On the off hand you need to use a MBP to bang out some work in the field it’s there. I think what we have here is a bunch of folks who want to feel good about their purchase while we all know a 2017 or a 2015 would be more than adequate since no one here is using their Macs for anything that generates revenue, by and large, and then there’s the rest of us who just use the machine we got and aren’t sweating it because it makes money and the amount of time having a pissing match costs more than just doing work on an acceptable machine.
If your not using the machine to generate revenue then you wouldn't need an i9. The conversation here has been from the beginning that based on benchmarks and real world results that it is not worth the $400 premium for an i9 that performs as well as the base model 15" i7. I don't care what field you work in, you can't justify to me that saving an extra 15-20 seconds on an export is worth spending an extra $400.
Nothing so far suggests that the i9 is faster when you factor in the 560X GPU. Anything within ~1-2% is permissible variability.
Multiply numerous exports per day over a year or for however long you are keeping by the machine.
That money is a deductible expense for professionals anyway.
Which would be a reasonable reason for it, as the time does add up.
Might want to re-read @dannyar's first sentence: "If you're not using the machine to generate revenue then..."
Just how many people do you think do numerous long exports on a daily basis, on a portable computer, who aren't doing that to generate revenue?
So? You're not erroneously thinking that makes it free, right?
Deductions merely offset income, thus reducing the income tax burden. Effectively means a discount equivalent to the marginal tax rate for the entity that purchased it.
Just answering aggressively in hyper knee jerk internet style while misinterpreting what people say makes it hard to reply to you rationally. It's so usenet 90s.
More of a 80's style IMHO
Yes, I misunderstood the first portion of your post. My apologies. I do still find the "just write it off" stuff annoying, thought that's more from it being a pet peeve than anything else. It makes it sound like the cost becomes trivial, which is typically far from correct.
Easy to play that card. I knew it would come up as I was typing it. Honestly, even if your exporting 3-4 projects a day your saving less than a minute a day. Thats not how life is lived. We live it day to day. You'll spend more time sitting in front of your computer day dreaming than you would waiting for an export to finish 20 seconds later. Accumulating those seconds over the even 5 years you will have the computer is nonsense. Lets be real here. Whoever shelled out that extra cash for the i9 hoping it would be considerably faster than the base i7 was taken for a ride.
I have not tested C1 yet but in going from my top spec 2017 to my new i9 2018 I am seeing significant improvements across the board. To set the stage, I have been doing nothing else for a living but high end commercial advertising and editorial photography for some 30 years. In the digital end, I work with hi res Nikon and Hasselblad files often stitched for large displays.
I did one simple test to see if I would keep my new 2018 over the 2017 and it was to convert 100 high ISO Nikon D850 raw files from NEF to high quality jpeg in LR CC using normal adjustments for white balance, saturation, sharpness, etc. The outcomes are shown in minutes and are as follows:
2017 15" i7 3.1ghz/16gb ram/560 4gb gpu/ 2tbSSD, 6:15
2018 15" i9 2.9ghz/32gb ram/560 4gb gpu/ 2tbSSD, 4:20
iMac Pro 10 core 3.0ghz/128gb ram/16gb gpu/ 2tbSSD, 1:45
As you can see the 2018 is a significant improvement over the 2017 in terms timing of exporting RAW's to client deliverables and now makes a perfect backup and mobile pairing for the power house iMac Pro. I personally don't care what some Youtube wannabe says, clock speed and cores rule the day on exports and ram GPU rule the day for all the rest.
As we have been saying, every benchmark that causes thin and light machines to hit their thermal limits performs in the same ballpark. I'm really surprised intelligent adults can't figure this out, even people who claim to be computer experts (rather, clickbait masters).
But if your machine is not hitting thermal limits because you are using apps that are suitable for thin and light computers, then the results are like this:
![]()
Thin and light machines are not supposed to be for high power hours long CG and 4K/8K rendering. Nobody does that in the professional fields.
I guess the question then becomes how many of these short-run (~4-5 min) tasks you end up running in a day, since longer-running tasks, or heavy multi-tasking will presumably end up being a wash, as they soak up the CPU and/or GPU, leading to similar performance on the 2.6 vs 2.9 (according to all benchmarks and real-world tests I've seen so far).
Let's say you run 6-8 of these 4-5 minute tasks per hour, and save 11-13 seconds for each task. In an 8-hour day, you've saved about 1-2 minutes of time per day. (I'm specifically talking about 2.6ghz vs 2.9ghz). I don't do photo editing for a living, so I can't really talk to whether 6-8 5-minute tasks per hour is a good estimate, or whether 100% of tasks fall into this category, so you are literally shaving 5% of the time off your entire work day. If the latter, then maybe the i9 makes sense. Its like giving yourself a 4-5% raise, if you do fixed-bid projects.
My workflow tends to be ~80% editing C# code + running scenes in the Unity Editor, with only occasional building out a project to XCode, and then building from there to iPhone. Given that everything I've seen so far, the i7 2.6ghz performs similarly to 2.9ghz in CPU+GPU intensive tasks, and in compiling using XCode tasks, the i9 didn't seem worth it.
Still awaiting other developer-oriented testing to solidify my thinking, but those types of tests are unfortunately few and far between. In the meantime, I bit the bullet and ordered the i7 2.6ghz model, and spent the savings on a good TB3 dock.
[doublepost=1533145584][/doublepost]
The main focus of this thread is on the 2.2 vs 2.6 vs 2.9 models, though. If the i7 2.6ghz did the conversion in 4:33, would it be worth it to you to spend the extra $300 to save 13 additional seconds? How many 13 second savings would you get in your typical day?