Apple's 11-inch MacBook Air (Core i7 1.8GHz) Review Update
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 1, 2011 6:08 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
- Apple
- Intel
- Core i7
- Sandy Bridge
- MacBook Air
Performance
In our 2011 MacBook Air review I presented a couple of numbers that showed up to a 27% increase in performance from the i7 over the stock i5 in the 11. I ran the upgraded 11 through our complete performance suite and came up with an average increase in performance of about 22%. Given the increase in base clock speed is only 12.5% for the i7, the rest of the performance improvement had to have come from the higher turbo ratios and larger L3 cache.
I tend to follow the 10% rule: performance improvements greater than 10% are noticeable. In the case of the 11-inch MacBook Air, the upgraded i7 delivers a noticeable increase in performance.
Note that due to the smaller chassis, the upgraded 11 isn't always as fast as the 13-inch MacBook Air with the same CPU. Maximum single threaded performance looks pretty similar but under a prolonged heavily threaded workload the upgraded 13 is actually a bit faster:
| Core i7 1.8GHz Comparison: 13-inch vs 11-inch MacBook Air | ||||||
| Cinebench R10 (1 thread) | Cinebench R10 (4 threads) | Cinebench 11.5 (4 threads) | ||||
| Core i7 1.8GHz (13-inch MBA) | 4083 | 8234 | 2.46 | |||
| Core i7 1.8GHz (11-inch MBA) | 4087 | 7785 | 2.36 | |||
The advantage is around 5% in Cinebench so I doubt it's anything noticeable.
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jnmfox - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
"If you're buying an 11-inch MacBook Pro and care about performance, the 1.8GHz CPU upgrade is worth it."An 11-inch MBP could be sweet though....
CharonPDX - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
For $50, you get an 11" that is faster than the base 13", and you're giving up an SD slot and some resolution, in favor of a smaller/lighter chassis and better performance.To me, it's a no-brainer. If I were in the market to replace my notebook right now (aka: if my MacBook Pro were to die in the next couple months,) I would immediately get an 11" Air upgraded to i7.
h00ligan76 - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
You also give up battery life, and that screen space is palpable to some. Anyone needing photo editing on the go is going to benefit from added screen, sd (potentially) and battery life...I agree for some it's a no brainer.. just which way depends on the person :)
vrusso87 - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
I was just at the web store and noticed something characteristically Apple - you can't upgrade the base 11-inch (64GB) or 13-inch (128GB) Air models to the i7. You have to swallow the $200-$300 price premium for the larger SSD before you can shell out another $100-$150 for the i7.Irksome.
blue_fireball_eater - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
Is how fast the OWC Aura drive run in these machines. I have the Samsung drive, so should I even consider upgrading to a Sandforce drive, or just wait for inevitable Sandforce 2000 version to come out?tipoo - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
I'd still like to see decible readings of these at load, I see them in other Anandtech laptop reviews but for some reason never on Mac's.aladdin68 - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
does the fact that the 11 in i7's run a little hotter likely to have any impact on their overall lifespan as compared to the 11 in i5's?narlzac85 - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
I wish there was a comparison review of the base $999 model, because I think a lot of people are going to buy that one not realizing that they are only getting 2GB of memory and its not able to be upgraded. Which to me would seem like buying a completely crippled system. Wasn't 2GB determined to be the absolute minimum for OSX way back in Leopard? Bad move by Apple. They should have ditched thunderbolt on the base model and increased the memory. Considering more ram benefits everyone and thunderbolt benefits very few people at the moment. Or they could have just eaten the cost of the 2 extra GB if they are really trying to push Thunderbolt.h00ligan76 - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
My air boots requiring 1.25 GB - before running anything. It starts paging pretty fast even with 4gb the minute lightroom and photoshop get opened.At this point, for anything other than an iPad with a keyboard, I wouldn't be buying the 2gb model.
hechacker1 - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link
I too noticed as soon as I upgraded to Lion, even with 4GB it started to swap out to disk.I'm assuming they changed the memory management in Lion compared to Snow Leopard, because it rarely swapped in SL.
So I went out to buy 8GB, and now it doesn't swap. But it does somehow consume 7.5GB with what I assume are caches (even when I'm not running lots of programs).