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rMBP vs. Razer Blade?
- Thread starter exizeo
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Okay, I am curious here. What is the logic behind your decision? You hate the fact that one piece of the OS you have used through your entire life is different, so you switched to an entirely different platform?
Do you just really hate the new start menu? But then you could just fix it with one simple download.
Do you hate having a locked down OS with an app store? But you switched to Apple, which has been doing this forever.
Is it some sort of a principle thing against changing things dramatically? But then again, you switched to Apple, which has a history of things like that (Final Cut X, anyone?)
Don't write me off as a Microsoft fanboy, as I honestly don't understand and would like to know.
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cmbp
Tbh, my MBP or 'cMBP' (what's the c?) feels pretty bulky...definitely rock (or metal!) solid. I do think I'd enjoy a slightly thinner laptop, though.
c is classic, unibody mid 2012 13" is the one i have.
It does feel solid and thats so great about it
Like a nokia lumia compared to the iphone. The iphone has better specs and is thinner, but the lumia feels more solid like its not going to break if I hold it wrong.
c is classic, unibody mid 2012 13" is the one i have.
It does feel solid and thats so great about it
Like a nokia lumia compared to the iphone. The iphone has better specs and is thinner, but the lumia feels more solid like its not going to break if I hold it wrong.
The iPhone 4s's I've felt feel pretty solid to me. Same with my iPod Gen2. I've definitely abused that thing as a teenager...
Ipod classic is solid.
The iphone im talking about is 5 and onwards
way too thin and light for meMaybe im just "holding it wrong" but iphone 4 and 4s are better in terms of this.
To be fair, the 870m is so much faster because it alone draws almost as much power and puts out as much heat as an entire rMBP.
(Which is another factor one should consider.)
razerzone.com
Ipod classic is solid.
The iphone im talking about is 5 and onwards
Maybe im just "holding it wrong" but iphone 4 and 4s are better in terms of this.
Was talking about the older iPod touches, but yeah, the classic ipods are definitely awesome in that regards.
Ipod classic is solid.
The iphone im talking about is 5 and onwards
Maybe im just "holding it wrong" but iphone 4 and 4s are better in terms of this.
Sounds like you equate heaviness with being solid. Just because something is heavier, it doesn't mean it's built better.
True...an example being all heavyweight, plastic, cheap PC laptops. Absolutely hated the HP pavilion laptop I had for a few years.
The Iris Pro is better if you want to play games on the go that aren't super demanding or you can trade graphical fidelity for significantly lengthening your play session. We are after all talking about laptops here, not desktops.
I don't think the 17" one really is that good of a comparison... The 13" MBP has a screen area of about 76cm2 when the 14" Blade is about 84cm2 and width wise the 14" Blade is over an inch wider while being about the same height. As for the 17" Blade, it's about 123,5cm2 in total area while the 15" Pro is about 101cm2 and over two inches "narrower". What you should take from this is that the closer you are to 1:1, the bigger the screen is actually going to be compared to the diagonal width (which is unfortunately what people use when comparing screen).dusk007 said:
My actual point was still that when you're working with text/code you EFFECTIVE screen real estate is going to be better utilized with a 16:10 screen than a 16:9 one when the limiting factor is height, not width.
You really shouldn't stare blind at raw technical specs like that, specially when it's about a massive multiprocessor. A fairly basic rule in scientific computing, where massively parallel systems have been everyday stuff for over a decade, has been that the more parallel your system is, the lower the degree of utilization is going to be.dusk007 said:
I've personally worked with CUDA, currently optimizing a program of mine, and I know more than well enough that it's easy to show off the performance of super parallel GPU's in an academic environment, but an entirely different thing to do it with something actually practical.
Check the tests that have been done. Iris Pro does not lead in efficiency at medium in high load. You won't play any longer on battery. The Nvidia Kepler is just more efficient with the CPU only lightly utilized. If a game isn't demanding at all (like a card game) a hd 4600 would suffice too.
The only efficiency lead Iris Pro has is in power managment. When OSX keeps the dGPU active just because an App is open but not actually doing anything at the moment. Iris Pro can power down on demand but the dGPU even in the lowest power states adds about 30% to total power draw.
Which is what I said. A 14" 16:9 feels in use kind of like a 13" 16:10. The bigger size only becomes useful when watching movies but when being productive people rarely do that and in spare time most people would still prefer an external screen or a TV than watch a movie on 14".
A 15" 16:10 feels like the 16" 16:9 and thus in feel the 14" razer is closer to a 13" than the 15".
CUDA doesn't matter for the majority of people. Graphics matter and that is an embarassingly parallel workload. 870M is Kepler just like the 750M. It is just a lot more of the same. It is like comparing dual cores to quad cores. But it is more than that it is effectively 3 times the GPU and unlike cpu workloads, graphics scales really well with more cores.
It is 2-3 times the performance of the 750M.
The 870M is as much faster than the 750M as the 750M is faster than the HD 4600. If that is easier to understand. This doesn't have anything to do with blindly staring at specs, it is just a fact. The specs do tell a lot if it is the same acrchitecure of if the difference is just huge.
Comparing the 870M Razer with the 750M rMBP is effectively like comparing a HD 4600 powered quad core business notebook that has no dGPU with the rMBP and its Iris Pro/750M. It is just nowhere even close in GPU performance.
I have a hard time believing that an Iris Pro can somehow draw just as much power as a GTX 870, a fairly high end dedicated chip, on load. Thus I'm basically going to point out that the burden of proof rests on you so I won't believe you until you until you get me links to those tests.
That doesn't speak very well of the Razer considering it's still rated (read: probably actually does worse) at 2 hours less under low stress than what the Pro is known to be able to handle.dusk007 said:
Now you're literally arguing against math with how you think something "feels". That's just stupid and about as dumb as when religious nuts try to argue against people in science with "But the bible says this". When working with text the 15" Pro has a whole inch of of extra vertical space compared to the 14" Blade and just 0.4 inches less than the 17" Blade.dusk007 said:
While graphics is a very parallel task, it's not so parallel that it would overcome the issue of overhead in a massively parallel processing unit. Add to this a fairly sizable overhead from drivers and suddenly that massive lead in theoretical performance dwindles down. To curb this there's developments like Mantle and the additions done to DirectX in version 12.dusk007 said:
Now that genuinely is just blindly starting at specs when you make statements like that. The least you could do is look at some benchmarks before you make a statement like that. Here's some figures from Notebookcheck's Cinebench R15 tests:dusk007 said:
HD 4600 - Median: 17.5
GTX 750M - Median: 61.1 (i.e about 250% faster)
GTX 870M - Median: 100.4 (i.e about 60% faster)
Now that looks a whole lot less impressive than your claim of the 870M being 2-3 times the speed of the 750M... As for the Iris Pro, it does a median score of 39,2 thus being more than twice as fast as the HD 4600.
If there's one thing I really hate about what has started happening on the internet over the last few years it's that everyone now thinks they're an expert on technical specs when they can compare compute unit counts, amounts of memory and clock frequencies.
Well 1400x900 is half the retina screens resolution. 750 works with it.
1600x900 is half the razers resolution. 870 works with it, but it can as you said also do higher resolutions.
If you want OSX, get the MBP. If not, get the Razer.
You might also note one company has a slightly longer and better track record with service and support.
I don't like windows as much as MacOS. After switching, I don't feel like I'll ever fully switch back.
If you're planning on gaming at all then a 13" MBP is out of the question. Look at this list: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Iris-Graphics-5100.91977.0.html
There aren't many games that will run on a 5100, even at low settings. You'd have to consider the 15" with the 750m, but you've already said 15" is out of the question.
So since I've been in your shoes before last year around this time, I returned a 15" rMBP w/650m and picked up an MSI GT60 w/675m. Even after adding a 480GB SSD I still saved around $700.
I looked long and hard at the Razer Blade last year, and decided it was too much $. This year's model is much nicer and has the 870m which is basically a 680m so you'll be able to play almost anything at high or better detail in 1080p. It's a sweet laptop and there isn't anything close to it at that size so I say go for it.
There aren't many games that will run on a 5100, even at low settings. You'd have to consider the 15" with the 750m, but you've already said 15" is out of the question.
So since I've been in your shoes before last year around this time, I returned a 15" rMBP w/650m and picked up an MSI GT60 w/675m. Even after adding a 480GB SSD I still saved around $700.
I looked long and hard at the Razer Blade last year, and decided it was too much $. This year's model is much nicer and has the 870m which is basically a 680m so you'll be able to play almost anything at high or better detail in 1080p. It's a sweet laptop and there isn't anything close to it at that size so I say go for it.
I did but you need to only look at those settings that aren't CPU bound. If you include low/med settings the 870M isn't faster because the CPU limits.
Check Battlefield 4, Crysis the HD 4600 is half the 750M on high/ultra settings and the 870M is double to triple again of the 750M.
Cinebench is just a terrible example for comparing GPUs. Just look how that benchmark scales. Check the 3dMark FireStrike
818 HD 4600
about 1800 750M GDDR5 +120%
4664 870M +260%
If you check any of the more demanding games and ignore the CPU limited ones, it follows the Fire Strike benches. If the CPU limits, the GPU is fast enough anyway. Mantle and DirectX overhead is more of an issue on slow CPUs. The Intel Quad Cores only get a single digit improvements.
I also find it annoying when people don't know which benchmarks to consult and to know what they actually tell. Cinebench doesn't scale like the workloads that matter to 98% of the users. It is also hugely driver dependent as the much better scores on workstation GPUs show. Again if you have the same architecture you can compare technical specs and all I tried to get across in my initial post is just how big the difference is.
It is the Iris Pro vs 750M that has been tested and is more efficient at equally high load. That was what I wrote about. But it ultimately makes little difference because under gaming load even a MBP draws about 80W (with Iris Pro) which drains the battery in an hour. It isn't really feasible to play on battery regardless.
I am guessing the 870M would run with some quite a bit lower clock on battery.
Again you start with comparing 15" to 14". If you put them next to each other that vertical space of the 14" is comparable to the 13" 16:10 and for office work makes it about as useful. This response of yours just makes no sense, you say what I write is dumb and then you just complain about the exact same thing as me. You seem to be just as dumb as me
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The reason why I brought up Cinebench is because it's a cross platform benchmark that simulates regular graphics performance fairly well and isn't all about game performance. The reason why I didn't pick a game focused benchmark like some version of 3DMark is because they're very light on the CPU compared to actual games and don't fully represent the proper performance when playing games.
The reality is that games generally are affected by the CPU and there's really nothing that's all GPU unless it's some kind of academic demo or non-real time (which basically disqualifies most GPGPU stuff). AMD's mantle tries to reduce this and both OpenGL and Direct3D are also trying to tackle the CPU/driver overhead.
Lovely how you went ahead and cherry picked the one test that showed the greatest advantage for the 870M. While the tests don't show what CPU is being used, a 1080p resolution will undoubtedly give the 870M an advantage purely because it's obviously bundled with the fastest CPU of the bunch. This is why GPU benchmarks are generally run on a low resolution to even the playing field by lowering the effect the CPU has on the situation.dusk007 said:
Here's the 1280x720 Ice Storm bench:
HD 4600: 50311 (median)
GTX 750M: 71696 (median) - About 40% faster
GTX 870M: 187697 (median) - About 160% faster
Don't even try that crap... Real life performance does not scale with the number of compute units and clock frequencies you're trying to make it seem like. It's simply a case of diminishing returns that worsens the more compute units add and the higher the clocks are.dusk007 said:
You're still throwing around claims I asked you to find links for in my last post. Ether deliver or concede that it's something you can't prove.dusk007 said:
The fact that the 13" Pro has the same usable screen real estate in text based work as the considerably bigger 14" Blade doesn't speak particularly good of it.dusk007 said:Again you start with comparing 15" to 14". If you put them next to each other that vertical space of the 14" is comparable to the 13" 16:10 and for office work makes it about as useful. This response of yours just makes no sense, you say what I write is dumb and then you just complain about the exact same thing as me. You seem to be just as dumb as me
As you still don't get it - I'm talking about actual usable space for real work in comparison to size and thus also portability. We are talking about laptops after all where effective use of screen real estate is important. If you can get the same effective real estate in a smaller machine or better in a same size machine it doesn't exactly speak very well of the device in question.
So in short: The Razer blade is the machine for the haard-coor pee-cee gay-murrr crowd that made up about half of my first year group in Computer Engineering at University who got in because it was piss easy and mostly dropped out by the end of the first year because of all the math.
While I agree that synthetic benchmarks do not represent gameplay experience, it is a generally accepted that higher resolutions eliminate rather than amplify cpu bias, as the gpu receives a disproportionate amount of the workload. For example, with the same gpu setup in my tower (same ram etc) my 3770K @ 4.5 Ghz produced a dramatically higher framerate than the 4.0Ghz 1090t it replaced on titles like BF3 at low resolutions/settings, but were effectively indistinguishable at 1080p/ultra resolutions.
This is a fairly extreme example, as the i7 is dramatically faster than a Phenom II, however while anecdotal it demonstrates that higher resolutions reduce rather than amplify the influence of a cpu on the framerate due to fewer frames being produced. This of course can vary on a game by game basis due to settings that offload post-processing to the cpu, or poorly coded programs that are not multi-threaded limiting the gpu.
I'm not going to say 'take my word on it,' so looking at a reputable reviewer should show the same result (frame disparity between computers with the same gpu shrinking as resolutions increase). As we are discussing full systems rather than individual gpu comparisons, I think this will be most evident at a site like Notebookcheck that will review a selections of laptops with say a 750m.
While I agree with much of this, I disagree that increasing clocks inherently creates a diminishing return. I am typing from an early 2013 rMBP, and have a 3770k based tower I have used at both 3.5 and 4.5 Ghz. Much like anything in a computer parts are dependent on other parts. I use my tower for deep sky astrophotography processing, on a program coded for up to 16 threads, and can say that I saw an almost 1:1 gain between the % decrease in processing time and % increase in clock from the stock turbo clock to 4.5 Ghz (it was either 3.8 or 3.9 on the stock turbo). In this case I can only assume the workload was not running into a limitation on the chip, but you are likely correct for hardware running closer to its limit. For example pushing my rMBP to similar clocks (this is hyperbole, I don't over clock laptops) would be limited by the supporting parts earlier than my desktop with a board designed for OCing supported by fast ram and SSD's.
Anyway, I was reading this thread and figured I'd jump in for a comment.
Now picking Ice Storm just makes my point. Ice Strom is a benchmark that is specifically tailored to picture mobile gaming performance. It represents the workload games on tablets would have. The CPU, Geometry, Texture, shader workloads representative on these platforms. It is completely pointless for higher performance GPUs because it doesn't scale. Any GPU even a HD 4600 is more than fast enough for anything that resembles that workload.
Fire Strike has the high shader workload that you find in current generation PC games. They don't double or triple every processing unit in a faster GPU but only those that scale with the workload they are likley to see. If you go ahead and actually look at the benchmarks of modern games they scale in line with fire strike not ice storm.
BTW that is the whole point of why the newest 3dMark includes three and not just one benchmark. If you look at the older ones you will also notice that they scale less with faster GPUs. Picking Ice Strom to compare dGPUs in notebooks is just completely misunderstanding the benchmark.
Cinebench is cross plattform but it renders a static picture with a set amount of effects (In real workload the effects change with more available processing power because you can do more and the additional effects usually put more load on the GPU). This isn't what those GPUs are geared for and does only represent workload somewhat well for people that use such software, who'd likely pick a workstation GPU notebook if they went for a 2000+ price range notebook if they can.
For the power requirements. I tested my own notebook, notebookcheck and some other people in different threads also measured power consumption.
Iris Pro in i.e. Starcraft 2 sucks 80W. The same with 750M active is 77/78W. With some more performance on the dGPU which meanst the quad core CPU is actually a bit more active in the dGPU setup.
The thing with dGPU performance is always that until you start up a game you most likely don't need any of it. For programming anything works. Photoshop also needs much less than people think. I use Gimp anyway because if I ever need such functionality. CAD and engineering guys are a rare breed, who will likely not care to much about either of these to models.
If you only game casually a hd 4600 can be enough too sometimes. The 750M is the minimum for somewhat decent medium quality gaming with the more demanding new titles. An 870M is just a new step and gets you decent performance for quite a while longer and plays practically everything on high of current stuff.