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MBP 15" i7 seems slow.

S

sjm300

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 15, 2009
54
0
I recently got my 15" i7 and it seems very sluggish compared to my 15" 2.8 C2D.


are their any benchmark test I can run to see if its running up to par compared to others?

only thing I did to it was add a western digital scropio blue 640gb hard drive ( 5400rpm )

is anyone else feeling the same way about the i7?

( I mean sluggish booting up, starting apps ( photoshop, lightroom, itunes, iphoto etc )
 
I would love to go with a SSD, but I really like the storage factor ( Im a professional photographer )..plus the price for storage is crazy

With that being said, which HDD do you guys recommend for a 7200?
 
If you are able to, a 7200 rpm drive would be a better option. It would not only be faster, but any noise increase / battery life decrease should be negligible.

Obviously, a SSD would be significantly faster, but at a premium price. Also, as you chose to go with a 640 GB drive originally, the smaller storage capacity of a SSD might not appeal to you.
 
SSD if you have the money. 7200RPM for a simple boost for cheap. The Seagate Momentus XT 500GB seems promising. I haven't used it since I'm using a 1TB hard drive and cannot go back to anything smaller anymore.
 
Same Problem

My girlfriend is a switcher and just purchased the top of the line 17" Macbook Pro i7 with 7200 drive (couldn't afford the SSD). She is having the same experience. Her Macbook Pro is severely underperforming. In fact, it's barely faster than her crappy Dell laptop which is almost 4 years old. She took it into the Apple Store and they agreed that it was running slow, but could not discern what the problem was. They recommended that she call Apple and exchange it. She did and her new 17" will come in the mail this week.

I am fearful that she will have the same experience with this one. I guess we'll wait and see. She keeps reminding me that she could have bought a brand new Quad Core Dell laptop with Windows 7, Blu-Ray, a 1 GB graphics card, internal 3G card, blah, blah, blah AND a brand new Dell tower for the same price as this Macbook.
 
well I just put in a order for the seagate 500gb XT.

I hope this resolves the issue,
 
robotfist said:
My girlfriend is a switcher and just purchased the top of the line 17" Macbook Pro i7 with 7200 drive (couldn't afford the SSD). She is having the same experience. Her Macbook Pro is severely underperforming. In fact, it's barely faster than her crappy Dell laptop which is almost 4 years old. She took it into the Apple Store and they agreed that it was running slow, but could not discern what the problem was. They recommended that she call Apple and exchange it. She did and her new 17" will come in the mail this week.

I am fearful that she will have the same experience with this one. I guess we'll wait and see. She keeps reminding me that she could have bought a brand new Quad Core Dell laptop with Windows 7, Blu-Ray, a 1 GB graphics card, internal 3G card, blah, blah, blah AND a brand new Dell tower for the same price as this Macbook.
Click to expand...


shouldve let her then. Both of those will be faster, but not as purty.
 
robotfist said:
My girlfriend is a switcher and just purchased the top of the line 17" Macbook Pro i7 with 7200 drive (couldn't afford the SSD). She is having the same experience. Her Macbook Pro is severely underperforming. In fact, it's barely faster than her crappy Dell laptop which is almost 4 years old. She took it into the Apple Store and they agreed that it was running slow, but could not discern what the problem was. They recommended that she call Apple and exchange it. She did and her new 17" will come in the mail this week.

I am fearful that she will have the same experience with this one. I guess we'll wait and see. She keeps reminding me that she could have bought a brand new Quad Core Dell laptop with Windows 7, Blu-Ray, a 1 GB graphics card, internal 3G card, blah, blah, blah AND a brand new Dell tower for the same price as this Macbook.
Click to expand...

Wow, your girlfriend knows her tech! :eek: (congrats, btw)

Maybe it's the harddisk with her as well? If it's a Seagate, I have heard some negative things about them. Not about the XT though.
 
Xt

I have not heard anything about the Seagate XT. Wow. It seems like the perfect marriage between SSD and hard drive. When does it come out?
 
If you can swing it, the winning option would be a 128GB SSD system and apps drive and a 500GB drive in an Optibay in the SuperDrive space.

I have a Crucial 128GB SSD and can't see ever going back to platter hard drives for my laptops.

5400rpm drives are not that much slower than 7200rpm drives, not like back when drives were 60GB and the speed difference was truly tangible. Only an SSD will give you that "wow, this is faster" effect.
 
Hp

robotfist said:
My girlfriend is a switcher and just purchased the top of the line 17" Macbook Pro i7 with 7200 drive (couldn't afford the SSD). She is having the same experience. Her Macbook Pro is severely underperforming. In fact, it's barely faster than her crappy Dell laptop which is almost 4 years old. She took it into the Apple Store and they agreed that it was running slow, but could not discern what the problem was. They recommended that she call Apple and exchange it. She did and her new 17" will come in the mail this week.

I am fearful that she will have the same experience with this one. I guess we'll wait and see. She keeps reminding me that she could have bought a brand new Quad Core Dell laptop with Windows 7, Blu-Ray, a 1 GB graphics card, internal 3G card, blah, blah, blah AND a brand new Dell tower for the same price as this Macbook.
Click to expand...

I did buy a Quad Core i7 HP with 8gb RAM, bluray, 1gb graphics.. after using it for the full 14 days trial period, I decided to return it. Performance wise it is amazingly fast comparing to any pc I ever came across, installing programs is done in a jiffy. Quality of the screen however, is still not up to par to my white macbook that was 3 years old. Battery is another issue, only lasted me 2.5 hours. That won't even last me a flight from coast to coast, let alone trans pacific flight. And it's big and bulky, although it was exactly $1000 less comparing to a i7 MBP with 8gb RAM.
 
seventy9ers said:
...it was exactly $1000 less comparing to a i7 MBP with 8gb RAM.
Click to expand...

I love the Mac, but 1k is a lot of money, especially during times like these. If it was $500 more expensive, I don't think I'd mind as much.

I think my girlfriend is going to return her Macbook Pro. I feel bad, because I suggested she get it. But her point about being able to buy a top of the line Dell laptop AND a tower for the same price is a big deal.

She recently mentioned she could get a top of the line Dell laptop and install a 400 GB OWC Mercury Extreme SSD for that price.

When I looked into her claim, I found that for the same price as the decked out 17" Macbook Pro, she can get a decked out i7 Dell laptop with a 400 GB OWC SSD drive, Quad Core processor, Blu-Ray, 1GB graphics card, VGA, HDMI, Firewire 400, full size display ports, dual headphone jacks, eSATA, Express Card, AND an SD card slot.

When you push the 17" i7 Dell to the price of the 17" i7 Macbook Pro, you end up with a machine with 3 times the features that is 2 - 3 times faster than the Macbook Pro (due to the SSD).

I sure hope Apple decides to close the ever widening gap of price/performance in their computers instead of continuing to remove ports and charging extra for things like matte screens.
 
Did you restore from a Time Machine backup or something? I recently did a complete erase and install and dragged back in my personal files and reinstalled all programs and my computer feels like new. I don't really see how a new Macbook Pro could feel slow.
 
I can't speak for sjm300, but my girlfriend is a graphic designer and deals with large files often. She pushes her machine to the max, opening 250MB Photoshop files and what-not. It was surprising to see her i7 perform similar to (and even a bit behind) my old 2.4 Core Duo. Even her old POS Dell which is 3-4 years old wasn't that much slower.

As stated before, Apple has sent her a new one, so the jury is still out.

I did find this, which has me concerned:

http://blog.mhackintosh.com/2010/04/benchmark-xbench-macbookpro-core-i7/

And I've started to see sprinklets of people with "slow" issues on the i7 all over the web. Almost everyone is a graphics/video person:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/2769239

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r24200628-Slow-Handbrake-Performance-on-i7-Mac

http://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/978591

I know she has Photoshop CS5. I need to check and see if she's booting Snow Leopard in 64 bit to take advantage of the 64 bit Adobe Suite. Not sure if that matters or not.
 
so I got the Seagate momentus 500GB HDD. and the computer STILL seems slow.

Takes my mac 51 seconds to boot up with only adium loading at log in.

I see other times on her with c2d 13" MBP's loading PS, and other programs under 30 seconds.


when I got my momentus, I just did a ghosting over. Should I do a clean wipe and reinstall everything, or do you think the HDD could be faulty?

thanks in advance.
 
5400RPM drive is definitely a problem on the i7 machine. I'm on 7200RPM and I geekbench like 6500 points, try it and compare to others.
 
snouter said:
If you can swing it, the winning option would be a 128GB SSD system and apps drive and a 500GB drive in an Optibay in the SuperDrive space.

I have a Crucial 128GB SSD and can't see ever going back to platter hard drives for my laptops.
Click to expand...

I was surprised to see this thread, as my 15" i7 is the fastest, sexiest computer I have ever owned! I currently have 2 other laptops (one apple, one dell) and a 2.93 C2D iMac. The i7 MBP kills all!!!! It outperforms not only in loading, but more importantly with video and audio processing.

I got the standard hdd and as soon as it arrived, I put in a 120Gb OCZ SSD. I later added the optibay with the original 500Gb HDD.

It was well worth the money. I am now looking to replace the HDD in my iMac with an SSD.
 
sjm300 said:
so I got the Seagate momentus 500GB HDD. and the computer STILL seems slow.

Takes my mac 51 seconds to boot up with only adium loading at log in.

I see other times on her with c2d 13" MBP's loading PS, and other programs under 30 seconds.


when I got my momentus, I just did a ghosting over. Should I do a clean wipe and reinstall everything, or do you think the HDD could be faulty?

thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

My machine is in my signature...takes me about 42 seconds to boot (from pushing the power button to everything loaded). I assume Adium would add a few seconds.

I've read the Momentus XT "remembers" your commonly used files and stores them on the 4gb chip, but it takes it some time to sort that out, so perhaps it will speed up with time?

If you really want to speed things up, get an Optibay, a modestly priced SSD to which you will use for booting, and stick one of your larger HDD's in the bay for storage.

edit - curious, are you booting into 64-bit mode?
 
macbook pro needs...

1. quad core processors
2. a thicker laptop (bigger battery)
3. more heat sinks and more fans (1!) maybe coming out of the side
4. 512MB CARD STANDARD such as nvidia geforce gt 330m standard
5. 1 gb card for the 15 inch models.. maybe ati radeon mobility 4850 or 5850. maybe nvidia card
6. BLU RAY!
7.SSD 512 GB STANDARD
8. 300$ CHEAPER PRICE
 
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