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Apple MacBook Pro 'Fastest Windows XP Notebook'?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the dear-apple-we-need-new-laptops-xoxo dept.

rgraham writes "The Register has a great opening line in a recent article, "Want the fastest Windows XP Core Duo notebook? Then buy a Mac. According to benchmarks carried out by website GearLog, Apple's MacBook Pro running Windows XP is a better Adobe Photoshop rig than any other Core Duo laptop on the market." GearLog ran the same tests that were run by PC Magazine with the Mac coming out on top."

7 of 360 comments (clear)

  1. AMD by Eightyford · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It would be nice if they tested AMD notebooks.

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    Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
  2. fastest in one test by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Fastest WinXP notebook for the Photoshop test. It doesn't look like it fared so well in the Windows Media encode test.

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    This guy's the limit!
  3. Why photoshop? by Locke2005 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Because photoshop is one of the few applications out there that is actually designed to take advantage of multiple CPUs by splitting up the work.

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    I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
  4. Macbooks are also the most expensive by Enrique1218 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have been shopping around for a notebook for a family member. I found that Lenovo and Apple have the highest price dual core. Dell is of course the lowest. But looking at the specs, the lower price ones tend to have GMA or ATI Hypermemory GPU, slower memory, and are pretty bulky. Apple does put in the best stuff available at the launch. I would even venture to guess that the Macbooks are gaming quality.

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    You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
  5. Re:Best tool for the job by bunratty · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Differences in cache size, cache speed, disk access time, and disk throughput, among other things, would cause two computers with exactly the same CPU, RAM, and bus to run at different speeds. This is part of the MHz myth -- there's more to how fast a computer is than the speed of its individual parts.

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    What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
  6. Re:The Reg sexed up our dossier by saschasegan · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Apple has a tendency to heavily customize their machines, and one of their selling points is a tight coupling between hardware and software (namely, OS X.) So we wanted to make sure there was nothing in the Macs that would have prevented XP from running to the limits of the performance of the hardware, and to prove that a dual-boot solution could be both viable and desirable. I'll personally wait for the video drivers to call it "desirable," but we're safely within the realm of viable.

    Running these benchmarks also allowed a direct comparison between Apple hardware and other manufacturers' that always used to be cloaked a little by the difference in OSes. Now of course you can argue that the driver situation may have affected our results, but I hope this will be only the first of many data points. It's a start.

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    I'm Sascha Segan. Who are you?
  7. Photoshop Test by chowhound · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've always felt the photoshop tests were an absurd measure of a computer's speed. I run Photoshop CS1 on my G4/400 1GB at home. The only time I ran into a problem was attempting to work on a backlit movie poster for a theatre - 3x5 foot by 300 dpi, with layers, effects & filters. But that is an absurdly huge file. As a designer for 10 years, I never encountered a file that big.

    The point is that today's computers are overpowered. The now-deprecated Quad 2.7 G5 is vastly more powerful than any Photoshop jockey needs. Unless you're rastering 3D shiz or crunching a full length DVD-quality movie (neither of which requires Photoshop) it's just gonna be an issue for most users.