Review: MacBook 13.3″ Aluminium - Part 5

PERFORMANCE

Another big change is that this laptop uses an nVidia GeForce 9400M video card. It’s a shared-memory video card that uses 256MB of the DDR3 RAM when used with the Mac OS X. According to Apple, this new component increases the performances when compared to the old GMA X3100. In the Cinebench Open GL benchmark test, the new MacBook has been 2.3 times faster than the old model. In many games, the improvement is indeed five times more than the previous MacBook. The performances can be compared to a entry-level video card with dedicated memory (For example, the GeForce 9300 GS).

The processor hasn’t really been updated. The Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 has the same clock as the T8300 currently present on the previous MacBook model. They both work at a 2.4GHz speed. The only true change is on the frontside bus clock, that went from 800Mhz to 1066 Mhz. In a nutshell, the CPU is only slightly faster, but being produced with the 45nm technology, it requires less energy.