upgraded early 17" 2011 MBP w 16GB 1600 DDR3 and 840 Pro SSD: 10250 32bit Geekbench

[underblu]

I was thinking of grabbing a next gen MBP after the Conference but it appears Apple is waiting on sufficient supplies of Haswell Chips before they release it.

In the meantime I upgraded my 17" 2011 MBP (Intel Core i7-2720QM 2.20 GHz) with 16GB of some very fast Corsair memory and a 256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD. I've gotten a very nice 10,250 Geek Bench 32 bit score.

More importantly it just performs so well now. I've had some reservations on going to a 15" retina display as I honestly love the hires 17" matte screen on my MBP. I've also have been holding on to Snow Leopard which I love. Now I can enjoy my MBP with it large screen and the simplicity or SL for a while longer without much of a performance penalty compared to the current MBPros.

Anyone thinking about taking the plunge, I highly recommend it. It's easy to do and the cost is fairly minimal.

 

[duervo]

I was thinking of grabbing a next gen MBP after the Conference but it appears Apple is waiting on sufficient supplies of Haswell Chips before they release it.

In the meantime I upgraded my 17" 2011 MBP (Intel Core i7-2720QM 2.20 GHz) with 16GB of some very fast Corsair memory and a 256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD. I've gotten a very nice 10,250 Geek Bench 32 bit score.

More importantly it just performs so well now. I've had some reservations on going to a 15" retina display as I honestly love the hires 17" matte screen on my MBP. I've also have been holding on to Snow Leopard which I love. Now I can enjoy my MBP with it large screen and the simplicity or SL for a while longer without much of a performance penalty compared to the current MBPros.

Anyone thinking about taking the plunge, I highly recommend it. It's easy to do and the cost is fairly minimal.

Unfortunately, Geekbench scores won't be affected by the SSD or RAM upgrade. It's purely a CPU (and by extension) a RAM benchmark. The reason I say your RAM won't make a diff in the score (or any diff worth mentioning) is because you'd have to overclock the system for it to take advantage of the faster RAM. Without doing that, you're still going to be running at the stock RAM BUS speeds at which Apple has them set.

If you were to put the stock parts back and run Geekbench again, you would most likely get a very similar score.

SSD was a nice choice though, and makes for a very zippy machine, increasing the system's overall performance significantly. A very solid choice for increasing its longevity as well. Enjoy!

 

[sofianito]

Congratulation!

The most important thing are not the numbers but the daily perceived speed and productivity you gained after this upgrade . The boot time should not be taken into account because Mac users do not oftenly reboot as would do PC users.... Well, that was the case with XP. Maybe things have improved with Win7...

 

[Doward]

Unfortunately, Geekbench scores won't be affected by the SSD or RAM upgrade. It's purely a CPU (and by extension) a RAM benchmark. The reason I say your RAM won't make a diff in the score (or any diff worth mentioning) is because you'd have to overclock the system for it to take advantage of the faster RAM. Without doing that, you're still going to be running at the stock RAM BUS speeds at which Apple has them set.

Agreed (Jump to 3m 50s for the benchmark):

My 17" Late 2011 MBP with 16GB of 1600Mhz ram + 240GB Samsung 840 SSD benched 11,139 on the 32bit run.

Ideally, when I upgrade to a new MBP, I'd like to see scores in the 17k+ range to make it a worthwhile jump in performance. Fingers crossed for Broadwell, heh.