Where the MBP13 was borderline-playable, always between the 25-35 fps range, the Air is about 10% behind and makes it to the magical 30fps mark in STALKER, but nothing else. It’s still a ways ahead of the ASUS Core i3/G 310M combo, and all of our games are playable at native resolution.Īt medium settings though, the Air starts to fall off a bit. Given that the GPU is identical and that both are using 256MB of the system’s DDR3 1066 memory, it is likely that the 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo is slow enough to put a bottleneck on gaming performance. Based on the performance we saw out of the Pro 13, we know that the Air, even in 11” form, can still hold its own in games.Īt low detail settings, the Air is pretty consistently 20% slower than the Pro 13, except in SC2, where they were roughly equal. We’re looking at the same GT 216-derived GeForce 320M that was in the MacBook Pro 13, with the same 450MHz core and 950MHz shader clocks. The gaming benchmarks get a bit more interesting. Arrandale ULV notebooks, such as the Alienware M11x and its Core i7-620UM, are another matter entirely, with the newer architecture posting numbers nearly doubling the Air’s Core 2 processor. Versus the 13” MacBook Pro, you’re looking at roughly a 40% decrease in the CPU compute-heavy benchmarks, roughly equivalent to the reduction in clock speed from the 2.4GHz Pro to the 1.4GHz Air. As expected, Cinebench and the x264 encoding test gave us results around the same level as the Adamo and the rest of the old CULV gang. Months after we move to Arrandale ULV, leave it to Apple to bring the good old CULV platform back to relevance. The 11” Air has the same 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo SU9400 as the similarly thin Dell Adamo 13.
With the Windows install out of the way, we were free to test the living daylights out of it, and that we most certainly did. Apple says that you just need an external DVD drive, without specifying the MacBook Air SuperDrive, but your mileage may vary.īoot Camp Drivers are now downloaded from Apple's servers prior to the Windows installation Interestingly, my external optical drive wasn’t recognized as a bootable drive, so I had to run out and grab an Apple SuperDrive. The other quirk with putting Windows on the Air is that it must be done with a USB optical drive - no hard drive/thumb drive installs. My suggestion - if you plan on installing Windows and dual booting often, save yourself the headache and get the 128GB model. This makes installing Windows an interesting proposition since after the two OS installs, you’ve got right around 30GB of free disk space to work with. I, like Anand, have the lowest end 11”er, with 2GB memory and the 64GB SSD. As a follow-up to our Nvidia 320M/MacBook Pro 13 article last week, I’ve been running our Windows test suite on the MacBook Air 11”.
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