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The i5 1.7 GHz is a jewel

FYI my 11" i5 just arrived.

It's indexing, downloading drop box files, syncing evernote, I'm installing like crazy, fans are running yes, but not crazy loud and it's cooler doing these tasks on the bottom and top palm rest area than my 13" i7 is.

Therefore the 13" i7 is going back and I'm making the drive shortly to pick up the 13" i5. Cooler and quieter is better than a few seconds in speed.

The 11" i5 is zippy, noticeably over my 2010 11" ultimate.

So, I'll end up with two i5 Air's, 13" is my main machine for office, home office etc. And the 11" is my mobile and travel machine, car, plane ... just love the 11" so much, had to have it to :)

The only thing that collects dust is my Mac Pro in my office ... hate working formally from a desk ....
 
entatlrg said:
FYI my 11" i5 just arrived.

It's indexing, downloading drop box files, syncing evernote, I'm installing like crazy, fans are running yes, but not crazy loud and it's cooler doing these tasks on the bottom and top palm rest area than my 13" i7 is.

Therefore the 13" i7 is going back and I'm making the drive shortly to pick up the 13" i5. Cooler and quieter is better than a few seconds in speed.

The 11" i5 is zippy, noticeably over my 2010 11" ultimate.

So, I'll end up with two i5 Air's, 13" is my main machine for office, home office etc. And the 11" is my mobile and travel machine, car, plane ... just love the 11" so much, had to have it to :)

The only thing that collects dust is my Mac Pro in my office ... hate working formally from a desk ....
Click to expand...

Have you noticed a big drop off in speed. I know it's all new, but any feedback would be great. I bought the i5 but haven't opened it yet since I'm still at work. Hopefully I don't regret it. :)
 
rust1234 said:
Did you have the opportunity to see how it handles 1080p movies? This is something my current C2D (Win7) can't handle very well and a reason why I am considering the MBA.
Click to expand...

I just played a 1080p movie, variable 10-20 mbps bitrate according to VLC's stream information panel. It's as smooth as can be, and uses between 15 and 17% of the CPU (out of 100%).
 
Last edited:
Roman2K~ said:
I just played a 1080p movie, variable 10-20 mbps bitrate according to VLC's stream information panel. It's as smooth as can be, and uses between 15 and 17% of the CPU (out of 100%).
Click to expand...

i5 Air as well, this has been my experience with 1080p movies as well... This cpu is ridiculous (coming from a C2D mb pro) :D
 
@Apple Expert
Apple Expert said:
Thanks for the feedback. I have the i7 and my wife has the i5. I do notice mine does run warmer than hers. Any where from 5-10C degrees warmer. When it's idle they are about the same. Just sucks to see hers running in the 40'sC while I'm constantly in 50'sC doing the same task. I'm leaning toward exchanging for the i5. The small speed increase might not be worth it for the warmer CPU. Andatech did their review and claiming about 8% faster for warmer CPU. Not sure I want that. I've done test on both. While te i7 is faster it'd mainly faster when your doing heavy task suck as importing lots of photos or video editing. But even then it's not light speed faster. Decisions decisions.
Click to expand...
Sorry for the late response. I have seen posts from you in other threads. You seem well happy with the switch to the i5. I'm glad! If you have statistics out of your usage so far (CPU efficiency, battery life, ...), please keep us posted ;).

@Samsumac
Samsumac said:
i5 Air as well, this has been my experience with 1080p movies as well... This cpu is ridiculous (coming from a C2D mb pro) :D
Click to expand...
"Ridiculous": haha, that's for sure. The more I use mine, the more I like it :D. Right this moment I'm watching a low resolution XviD (~700 kbits/s) with VLC: 1.5% of the CPU! The battery icon is showing 4h22 at 78% remaining :cool:.

@entatlrg
entatlrg said:
FYI my 11" i5 just arrived.

It's indexing, downloading drop box files, syncing evernote, I'm installing like crazy, fans are running yes, but not crazy loud and it's cooler doing these tasks on the bottom and top palm rest area than my 13" i7 is.

Therefore the 13" i7 is going back and I'm making the drive shortly to pick up the 13" i5. Cooler and quieter is better than a few seconds in speed.

The 11" i5 is zippy, noticeably over my 2010 11" ultimate.

So, I'll end up with two i5 Air's, 13" is my main machine for office, home office etc. And the 11" is my mobile and travel machine, car, plane ... just love the 11" so much, had to have it to :)

The only thing that collects dust is my Mac Pro in my office ... hate working formally from a desk ....
Click to expand...

Sorry for the late response as well :eek:. Thanks for your feedback about the i5 1.6 GHz. And I can definitely understand the attraction towards the 11" (I went as far as to buy one just yesterday just to try out and compare to the 13" :D -- verdict).
 
Thanks for sharing. I think I will get an Air soon, but I am still torn between 11" or 13".
 
Titanium81 said:
How long does it take to encode a 10 min iMovie in 1080p?
Click to expand...

I can't speak for a 1080p export in iMovie, but maybe this will give you a rough idea of the i5's processing power:

Using Handbrake, downscaling an H.264-encoded, 2 hour-long movie (bitrate: 10-20 mbps) from 1920x1080 to 1280x720, 2 passes with turbo 1st pass:
  • i5 1.7 Ghz: ~6 hours. Starts at 16 fps for a few minutes (cores at 97°C), settles at 12-14 fps (cores at 89°C the rest of the time).
  • Desktop processor, AMD Phenom II 1090T (6-core at 3.2 GHz): a bit under 3 hours (and cooler than the i5 at idle...).
2 cores in a ULV Sandy Bridge processor, taking just twice as long as 6 cores in a standard voltage processors, that's impressive :).
 
h00ligan said:
Taking 1 hr on a modern intel counterpart desktop machine ;)
Click to expand...

Intel are far, far ahead of AMD when it comes to clock-for-clock computing efficiency, especially when looking at AMD's old Deneb architecture (as in the 1090T).

But unless you're talking about a heavily overclocked 980X or 2600K, the only way a similar encoding can take 1 hour (compared to 3 hours) is with a profile composed of less filters. I based my profile off "High Profile". Which one do you use when downscaling?
 
holterzoff said:
Hi,
i don't want to spit in your soup, but the 2010 macbook air runs games and other 3d-graphics tasks considerably better. That' s the downside of the new graphics onboardhttp://www.macworld.com/article/161362/2011/07/macbookairbenchmarks.htmlI had the opportunity to confirm this.
So for me, who likes a game now and then the old macbook air is preferable. Cheers regards
Click to expand...

Luckily I don't game on my MBA, but yes I agree dropping Nvidia for Graphics to Intel GPU really was a step backwards, but I think it was done because it was the only option available with the Sandy Bridge ULV CPU's with a GPU that wouldn't' generate too much heat and fit within the current MBA design body - almost identical to the 2010 model. Remember because of the MBA design, the CPU cannot use more than 45w of power, and there's no space for a discrete GPU which would also resolve this issue and shared VRAM usage with system RAM.
 
Roman2K~ said:
I can't speak for a 1080p export in iMovie, but maybe this will give you a rough idea of the i5's processing power:

Using Handbrake, downscaling an H.264-encoded, 2 hour-long movie (bitrate: 10-20 mbps) from 1920x1080 to 1280x720, 2 passes with turbo 1st pass:
  • i5 1.7 Ghz: ~6 hours. Starts at 16 fps for a few minutes (cores at 97°C), settles at 12-14 fps (cores at 89°C the rest of the time).
  • Desktop processor, AMD Phenom II 1090T (6-core at 3.2 GHz): a bit under 3 hours (and cooler than the i5 at idle...).
2 cores in a ULV Sandy Bridge processor, taking just twice as long as 6 cores in a standard voltage processors, that's impressive :).
Click to expand...

I wonder how much time the optional 1.8GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7 would shave off of that.
 
Roman2K~ said:
But unless you're talking about a heavily overclocked 980X or 2600K, the only way a similar encoding can take 1 hour (compared to 3 hours) is with a profile composed of less filters. I based my profile off "High Profile". Which one do you use when downscaling?
Click to expand...
Probably using Quick Sync (which unfortunately only supports up to Main profile).

It isn't supported under OS X (yet?), but when/if it is (or under Windows) the MBA might double its encoding speed.
 
I agree with the reviewers here. I was worried about the power of this machine compared to a MBP and the lack of the optical drive but I had no reason to worry. This machine packs a lot of power and certainly more than what I need it for. I have installed parallels and have seen no lag with this machine.
 
I didn't want to start another thread over this, because I feel that it is not that important but I am curious.. If the i5 1.7GHz is a dual-core processor, why do we have 4 CPU usage graphs in activity monitory? I've only seen that on quad processors..Curiosity has gotten the best of me!
 
Mlrollin91 said:
I didn't want to start another thread over this, because I feel that it is not that important but I am curious.. If the i5 1.7GHz is a dual-core processor, why do we have 4 CPU usage graphs in activity monitory? I've only seen that on quad processors..Curiosity has gotten the best of me!
Click to expand...

Hyper-threading. Those are virtual cores. The physical cores are only 2.
 
Roman2K~ said:
[*]On YouTube, I can finally watch videos for hours on end with ridiculously low CPU usage in HTML5-mode (with YouTube5 on Safari [hardware decoding], *not* Chrome [software]).
Click to expand...

Hi roman. I got some question bout youtube html5 on safari. I joined YT html5 but i still can't watch most of the videos on youtube via safari. how you do it? thx
 
OSMac said:
You did :)
Click to expand...

Yes I did. The heat was the reason. Speed was nice, but not at more heat. This thing runs cooler. I idle at upper 30's to low 40's. Even watching YouTube in 1080p is no problem. Would be averaging mid 50's with multiple safari tabs. While mail, iTunes and photoshop in background. :)
 
@squaremon
squaremon said:
Hi roman. I got some question bout youtube html5 on safari. I joined YT html5 but i still can't watch most of the videos on youtube via safari. how you do it? thx
Click to expand...
Hello :). The "HTML5 program" on YouTube has never worked for me either. I use a Safari extension: YouTube5. It works most of the time, sometimes videos won't start (black frame supposedly buffering), but it might be due to my irritatingly slow Wi-Fi :rolleyes:.
 
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