The 2013 MacBook Air Review (13-inch)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 24, 2013 12:01 AM ESTMore GPU Performance Numbers
The next set of benchmarks are taken from our 2013 Laptop Bench. Here we're comparing to HD 4000 and HD 4400, both using Acer S7s. Compared to HD 4400 the HD 5000 in Apple's 2013 MBA ends up being around 15% faster in most tests. Compared to Ivy Bridge/HD 4000 the gap ranges from lower single digits in thermally constrained environments to 25% or 40% in the best case scenarios.
3DMark GPU Performance
We close out our look at Intel's HD 5000 performance using a historical collection of 3DMark data. The comparison gives us some more data points to characterize Intel's HD 5000. The data here is all best case scenario for HD 5000 as there are no situations where we hit thermal limits.
On average, Intel's HD 4400 ends up being 18% faster than HD 4000, while Intel's HD 5000 is 31% faster.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
233 Comments
View All Comments
abazigal - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
It's ultimately an issue of tradeoffs. Long battery life vs High quality display. I think between the 2, more people will opt for the longer battery life (considering it is an air you are getting after all).xTRICKYxx - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
It shoulxTRICKYxx - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
It should be 1680x1050KPOM - Thursday, June 27, 2013 - link
Scaling is an issue. Apple won't change the resolution until it can go "Retina" and quadruple it. OS X wasn't designed to scale at 150% like Windows Metro. No sense making a halfway move when the output won't look good. That's probably why Windows 7 notebooks stayed at 1366x768 for so long. Windows 7 itself could scale but most Desktop applications can't.spronkey - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
To be honest, unless you go to *really* high res (i.e. "retina"), 1600x900 isn't really a large improvement on 1440x900, and anything higher than that becomes a little difficult to read without scaling, and ends up looking nasty. I personally think 1440x900 is a nice Mid-DPI resolution for these 13" machines.darwinosx - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
It is for pretty much everyone as unless you go all the way to retina you get tidy text and icons.axien86 - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
Not only that, but reading that Anand got the objectively better Samsung display instead of the LG display by luck of the "lottery" is one lottery that many buyers do not win.
Secondly, Anand describes Haswell THERMAL LIMITING and how it reduces performance, but how about simple measurements of important factors like CPU, GPU, keyboard and chassis temperature under load?
At other Mac forums, users with the new Macbook Air 2013 are finding many 3D games along with Flash/HD Youtube causes loud and irritating fan noise along with rapid dramatic rise in temperature.
No review of a ultralight laptop is complete without a complete noise and temperature analysis.
Synaesthesia - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
Anand's reviews are the best. The 2012 and previous models had no issues with fan noise and heat generation, nor thermal limiting. The 2013 models with Haswell have much lower power consumption and heat generation will necessarily be much lower, so I'm sure it's great too, and that thermal limiting doesn't kick in at all.Synaesthesia - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
Quoted from article: "For example, the fan was never audible on the 2013 MBA while running this test compared to running at a very noticeable volume on the 2012 Core i7 model. The same goes for temperatures. The i7 2012 model tends to run about 5% warmer along the bottom of the chassis compared to the 2013 i5."ddriver - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
They are far too biased, but then again, so are you probably, if you find them "the best" you simply are on the same direction of bias.