
I run memory and CPU intensive applications, especially with virtual machines and programming applications, and my MacBook just couldn't these heavy apps (deadly beach ball icon). The 15-inch model’s Call of Duty frame rates were nearly twice those of the BTO 13-inch MacBook Pro.I'm a graduating Computer Science student using a MacBook Pro early 2011, 2.3GHz Intel Core i5, RAM of 4GB 1333 MHz DDR3, and running at OSX Yosemite(10.10.2). The SSD BTO laptop was 58 percent faster in the file duplication tests and 56 percent faster in unzipping our compressed file, but when it came to Handbrake, MathematicaMark, and Cinebench, the BTO laptop’s dual-core Core i5 was no match for the quad-core Core i7 in the 15-inch model. The 15-inch model was 5 percent faster in our Speedmark 6.5 tests than the BTO 13-inch model. Handbrake, Cinebench CPU, and MathematicaMark were all slightly faster on the 2.7GHz MacBook Pro.Įven with an SSD, the BTO 13-inch 2.3GHz MacBook Pro was not able surpass the overall system performance of the standard $1799 15-inch 2.0GHz Core i7 MacBook Pro. File duplication and Unzipping compressed files took half as long on the SSD model than on the standard 13-inch 2.7GHz MacBook Pro. Again, as expected, the performance gains were in the most disk-intensive tests, not CPU or GPU-dependent tasks. With the SSD upgrade, the 13-inch 2.3GHz Core i5 MacBook Pro also outperformed the $1499 13-inch 2.7GHz Core i7 MacBook Pro with its 500GB 5400-rpm hard drive by 8 percent, overall. Those results were the same for both laptops. The storage device did not affect the results in tests that rely solely on the graphics processor or CPU. Importing and exporting iMovie files was faster on the SSD model, as was opening a large Word document in Pages.

Unzipping the file from the Zip test file took 38 seconds on the SSD model, compared to 65 seconds on the standard model. Zipping a 2GB folder took 2 minutes, 33 seconds on the SSD model, while the same task took just over 3 minutes on the standard model. Duplicating a 1GB file took just 13 seconds on the SSD model, while the standard model took 29 seconds. Overall, results from our Speedmark 6.5 test suite showed that the SSD-equipped MacBook Pro is 20 percent faster than the standard model with a hard drive.

You also get faster application launches, and faster disk functions.
