First Look: Apple MacBook Pro 2.5 GHz

My 2011 2.5 GHz MacBook Pro arrived today (4GB Apple memory).

I will be installing 16GB of OWC memory, and a 240GB OWC 6G SSD very soon.

Tests that follow are with the Apple 4GB standard memory (2 X 2GB).

Compute intensive benchmarks

The SHA1 hash has moderate memory access, pure CPU test shown below.

As expected, the 2.5GHz model is incrementally faster than the 2.3 GHz model, by about 6-7% for these tests for up to 4 CPU cores.

Obviously, there is not a huge advantage for a Mac Pro for general CPU intensive tasks (but a Mac Pro has much better expansion options).

MemoryTester 'compute' for SHA1 hash speed

Memory speed

The puzzler is computing that is memory intensive— why is the new 2.5Ghz model slower? Is Apple using some kind of slower memory design for its 4GB memory configuration? I will retest once I have the OWC 16GB kit installed.

Also, I tested my 13" MacBook Pro with the 8GB kit (2 X 4GB), and memory speed is testing about 12% faster with the 13" model than with the 17" MacBook Pro. So there is some funny business here with Apple’s 4GB configuration.

MemoryTester 'compute' for SHA1 hash speed