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tech: Nvidia graphics in MacBooks

October 22 2008 | WilHarris

Last week, Apple unveiled its latest line of MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks. Apart from sporting a rather sexy new look, they included, for the first time, high-end integrated graphics from Nvidia.

This week, Nvidia has been talking to the press about the latest chip included in the Macs, the GeForce 9400M, and how Apple has been using it. We hooked up with the guys from Santa Clara to see the improved graphics performance for ourselves.

We look at the 9400M in Call of Duty and the latest Photoshop CS4, as well as ask questions about the chip’s reliability in the wake of the problems Nvidia has had over the summer.

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comments

James
October 22nd, 2008 - 9:41pm

That was hardly a fair comparison. Comes across as an attempt to smear PC in favour of your beloved Apple, who’d have thought that eh ;). Would have come across better if you’d compared new Apple to old Apple or new Apple to something using the previous generation 8400m like a Dell XPS system or equivalent.

I’m beginning to get a little frustrated with the Apple fanboyism coming from your tech reviews. Every product you review seems to have some reference to an Apple product of some kind.

Not just you however Apple themselves are driving me away from them with their I’m a Mac ads I see all over the internet. Especially the latest hypocritical one about advertising money.

James

enoch
October 22nd, 2008 - 10:02pm

Haha, calling a 9400M “high end” in the text, and then making comparison to an Intel integrated graphics, and Jobs being excited about 54Gflops… Come on, this is a website for people who do know their tech.

The mac book looks slick, as ever.

H
October 23rd, 2008 - 1:05am

Count of the number of times Wil says “Now”: 4

Jim
October 23rd, 2008 - 1:52pm

Its all very well putting in speedy graphics processors for photoshop users but not having a matte screen option will rule it out for many photo/design professionals. Just watching this clip you could see loads of reflections, and thats just annoying.

As an audio professional, I am also concerned about the removal of the firewire port from the macbook too. It sets a worrying precedent for future hardware updates. Firewire is used by many external audio interfaces and software like ‘protools’ requires firewire drives for recording to external storage devices.

I’m going off apple, fast.

Jim
October 23rd, 2008 - 1:56pm

Count the number of times H says “Count of the number of times Wil says “Now”” : Too many

Jorge
October 24th, 2008 - 3:13am

So, I just purchased this macbook pro with the fastest processor available. Belive it or not, it was CHEAPER than a less powered XPS from Dell. It was also CHEAPER than a comparable Alienware (dell also.)

And yes I am a PC!

Fortunately, 64 bit drivers are available for all the hardware on this machine.

I will be putting Vista 64 on it, along with XP on a smaller partition. I will keep OSX on it for kicks, but I do not plan to use it.

I am pc fan, but you have to recognize awesome hardware when you see it.

-ps: Macfanboys, No I am not wasting my time running vista, I happen to like it better than osX.

Jim
October 24th, 2008 - 9:50am

@Jorge

“I will be putting Vista 64 on it, along with XP on a smaller partition. I will keep OSX on it for kicks, but I do not plan to use it.”

Can you do that? I think Bootcamp will only work with one windows partition. Also, you will need OSX in order to run bootcamp.

Please ignore me if I’m wrong, but I thought I’d warn you just in case.

Aaron Zollo
October 27th, 2008 - 8:51am

I have been looking for a video like this. I would like to see however, how well the old generation MacBook with the 2.1GHz processors compares to the new 2.0GHz when it comes to the same game and photoshop. Please do that review if you have the budget.

Jorge
November 1st, 2008 - 6:11am

Well Jim, turns out my dream of a triple boot MacBook Pro is just that; a dream!

Your assumptions where correct when you mentioned that bootcamp will only allow me to make one partition.

I’m glad I read your post, and tried to use a friends vista 64 disk to try it out before I actually purchased a copy of vista.

It didn’t work, but maybe in the future there will be a way to do it. I will keep researching the topic. For right now, I am VERY happy just having XP on the machine it is very zippy and my only complaint is that XP 32 is unable to address all of my memory (4gb) I’m stuck at 2.97GB of ram on the XP side.

I suppose windows 7 is only a few months away so I’ll wait for that.

Thanks again for the warning. I did keep OsX on the machine, I didn’t feel like finding out the hard way if I could still run windows without it so I left it on a 24GB partition and I put office for the mac on it, again, just in case.

Jorge
November 3rd, 2008 - 3:39am

Just an update.

After speaking with one of the techs from Apple, it turns out that you can do as many partitions as you want with the 08 MacBook Pro.

While bootcamp will only let you make one partition, if you boot from the OSX install CD and go to the disk parititioner you can choose to make the partitions necessary.

As it stands now I was able to make a 3pl boot MacBook pro.

parition osX: +- 60GB
Partition WINXP: +- 60GB
Win Vista 64: +- 177GB

It is working great!

Jim
November 4th, 2008 - 1:02pm

Thats great Jorge. Glad it worked out for you! It something for me to bear in mind for the future too!

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