2012 macbook pro case
We took a look at performance over time, and as expected, Ivy Bridge and Kepler do a really good job of minimizing heat buildup over time and the corresponding amount of throttling that occurs. We saw roughly equivalent performance with the rMBP again, with the MBP maintaining a slight edge over the Retina, but again with a margin of less than 5%. GPU performance is substantially improved over the 2011 MBP, with the GT 650M outpacing both the HD 67, to say nothing of the HD 6490 in the early 2011 Pro.
2012 macbook pro case upgrade#
Our usual recommendation from the last couple of years stands here too: if you're buying a new MacBook Pro, your first upgrade should be to add an SSD. Based on my limited experiences with the Retina, it really feels substantially more responsive. The SSD-based Retina obviously has faster boot times and performs significantly better in any disk-based activity.
The 2012 MBP retains the same thermal design as the 2011 model, so it's unsurprising to see that Apple is being more cautious with it. It appears that the i7's Turbo mode is less aggressive in the MBP versus the Retina, possibly due to the revised cooling system that the Retina model has. And with the performance deltas we're talking about, it's really almost like splitting hairs. Performance matched up pretty close, with the MBP being just a tick behind the rMBP in most of our benchmark suite. My tester was the high-spec SKU with the same 2.6GHz i7-3720QM, 8GB of DDR3, and 1GB GT 650M as Anand’s Retina MacBook Pro evaluation unit, with the primary hardware difference being the 750GB mechanical hard drive in place of the Samsung PM830-based SSD in the rMBP.
From a performance standpoint, the 2012 MBP lines up basically where we would expect it.