Two weeks ago we blogged about how upgrading to Apple’s maximum supported 8GB of memory and an OWC Mercury Extreme SSD could speed up your machine to two and a half times faster then stock in the latest 2011 MacBook Pro Core i5 and Core i7 machines.
Two weeks ago, we were ecstatic about the performance numbers we were seeing. Like an average 25% faster performance with 8GB of memory!
Two weeks ago, we dubbed these machines with our upgrades as “screaming fast.”
That was two weeks ago…
It’s been about a year or so since we introduced the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro and Pro RE Solid State drives and, what a year it’s been! We’ve seen them win award after award,extensive praise from media review sites all over the map and a reputation on tech forums that is second to none.
I’ve been deeply involved with development of our SSD product line since day one and decided that my MacBook Pro would be one of many machines around the office receiving a Mercury Extreme Pro RE 200GB drive for long-term testing. My MacBook Pro is without a doubt the single most important tool I have at my disposal here at OWC, so I knew the Mercury Extreme would get a solid workout.
Since I haven’t had much opportunity to chime in here on the OWC Blog, I felt this one-year anniversary would be a great time to share a quick look at performance of my drive from new to now. Article Continues…
We’ve been getting a lot of traffic regarding our OWC Turnkey Upgrade Program for the 2010 Apple iMac 27″ that allows you to customize your iMac with a high-performance eSATA interface port, OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSDs up to 480GB, hard drives up to 2TB, and/or OWC Memory Upgrades up to 16GB complete with shipping and warranty. The question asked most often though, seems to be what exactly is the benefit of upgrading my new iMac?
Well, the OWC Test lab has been a busy place and we’re pleased to announce that we’ve begun gathering the scientific data to show you just how fast you can make your iMac.
We’ve real-world tested the eSATA port and found data transfer rates are up to 3.3 times faster than FireWire 800 and an amazing 7.5 times faster than USB 2.0! We’ve put together hard drive configurations that achieve data transfer rates up to 6 times faster than the original stock hard drive alone! In adding more memory to an iMac, we’ve almost cut the processing time in half on our test machine.
For all the details, see our findings at http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/turnkey/iMac_2010_27
Since our original SSD Shootout back in February, we evaluated our tests and decided to update them. While we still found that the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD significantly reduces the boot time and application launch times of the computers in which they are installed, the extent that they do is quite impressive.
In these new tests, we time how long it takes to boot Mac OS X 10.6.3 and launch the four major components of Adobe Creative Suite CS5: Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and InDesign. This is a straight speed test – the first one finished wins.
In the “second” iteration of this test, we put an OWC SSD in a 13” MacBook Pro, left a nearly identical (though slightly faster processor) model in its stock configuration and let them duke it out. The difference was quite impressive; the OWC SSD-equipped machine trounced its higher-powered twin.
The difference was so impressive, in fact, that we began to wonder how much of a processor speed gap an OWC SSD could overcome. To test this, we took a stock i7 MacBook Pro, and put it up against previous iterations, going all the way back to the original Core Duo MacBook Pro from 2006. As impressive as the results were for the “second” test, this “third” test is even more eye-opening.
For your convenience, we’ve included the videos after the break. Article Continues…
Adobe announced today all the new features of Creative Suite 5 and that they are taking pre-orders. The actual product is expected to ship mid-May and I for one cannot wait!
With the re-write of Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and the bunch into cocoa, 64-bit support is now coming to the Mac platform. What does that mean? Simply that on top of all the great features, such as content-aware fill and puppet warp in Photoshop, there should be no more bottleneck in our memory benchmark tests! Adobe CS4 and prior were limited to a maximum of 3GB of memory usage – which was great back when 2GB was the maximum amount of memory that a particular Mac could be upgraded to. But once that barrier was broken and you could install more memory in any given system, our real-world benchmark testing admittedly fell behind a bit. Article Continues…
Today we completed the benchmarking of the last two iMac computers that Apple introduced last month: The 2.66GHz iMac Intel Core i5 and the 2.8GHz iMac Intel Core i7.
With the ability to simultaneously run 4 cores and 8 cores respectively, these machines are quite the powerhouses of processing power.
It’s interesting to note that even with faster starting times than the other iMacs in this series, the RAM Hog II test (which simulates powerhouse usage where 80% of the machine’s resources are busy with other processes) was rendered satisfied after 12GB of memory was installed.
Not to say that 16GB didn’t show significant results in its own right. The After Effects Render Test (which spawns subprocesses for each core processor) showed steady improvement in times as more and more memory was added to the computer.
And speaking of that 16GB upgrade, to put a spotlight on the results, the i5 model was up to 44% faster in that RAM Hog II test with the maximum memory installed.
As always, what level to upgrade your Mac is a personal choice. You can check out all the Late 2009 iMac memory and hard drive upgrade options and decide if you want to go mild or wild.
We’ve received four configurations of the 21.5″ and four configurations of the 27″ machines so far. The quad core i5 and i7 machines aren’t due out till later this month. Between the advancements in Snow Leopard and adding additional memory to these computers, they sure can go fast!
In fact – we found up to a 46% performance boost by installing the OWC 16GB Memory Upgrade Kit versus the factory installed 4GB.
We’ve run the machines through a rigorous battery of benchmark tests to test not only the pure processing speed of these machines, but also show what adding OWC memory to the setup can do. Additionally, the different video card options have also been pitted against each other, so if you haven’t purchased your iMac yet, we now offer a definitive tool for making an informed decision on which graphics card to order. Both of the Radeon HD options prove to generate twice the gaming frame rates than the Nvidia equipped model. Not too shabby!
Unlike the prior generation of iMacs, these models have a total of four DDR3 memory slots. You can add an additional 4GB kit and have 8GB total or an 8GB kit and have 12GB total without removing the standard factory 4GB.
Should you want to max the memory up to 16GB, you will need to take out those original modules. While Apple officially supports up to 16GB in all the new iMac models, they only offer up to 8GB in the 21.5″ model. Not only does OWC offer you the options for up to 16GB total, but even if you just need an additional 4GB, we’ll save you 50% compared to the same installed by Apple.
The results make our company mantra ring true. ”More Memory = Faster Mac!”
As additional machines are run through the same tests, they will appear on the same page as our overall goal is to have every Snow Leopard compatible machine tested using the same process.
We’re continuing our diligent work here at the OWC testing lab benchmarking every machine compatible with Snow Leopard and should be ready to start posting some of the results soon.
In the meantime, however, we found some great nuggets of information that we’d like to share!
For our latest test, we took two machines in which the most memory that can be installed was 2GB, maxed out their memory, and checked the performance gains that installing a faster hard drive can provide. The results were quite impressive!
The Contenders:
The original 2006 MacBook 13″
1.83GHz Core Duo running OS 10.6.1
The 2004 iMac G5 20″
PowerPC 1.8GHz running 10.5.8
Heres what we found:
Considering the investment that a new Apple computer can cost, it makes sense to get all you can out of the machine you have before taking the plunge. Installing a Solid State Drive can certainly extend the retirement date of your existing Mac for a fraction of the cost of a new computer.
*Address Book, Calculator, Chess, Dictionary, DVD Player, GarageBand, iCal, iChat, iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, Preview, QuickTime, Stickies, and TextEdit
