17" MBP runs slower than 15" MBP?
I get varying performance on the 17" and the 15" MacBook depending on the OS but all tested OS's run in stable manner. Here's a rather unscientific report of my findings. I used the exact same drive image on both machines. Both machines are using the exact same software settings and configurations by performing a fresh setup on the 17" and migrating from the 15" using target firewire mode. Only Safari was running with Parallels in both of the test suites.
15" reports:
Windows 2000 SP4 1.2Ghz (512MB allocated)
Windows XP SP2 2.2Ghz (512MB allocated)
Windows 2003 SP1 530Mhz (1024MB allocated)
17" reports:
Windows 2000 2.2Ghz (512MB allocated)
Windows XP SP2 1.3Ghz (512MB allocated)
Windows 2003 SP1 833Mhz (1024MB allocated)
Besides the reported speed, there is a visually noticable difference between Win03 and XP. The cursor drags big time even with the Parallel Tools installed. I would say the speed is roughly equivelant to XP-VPC under the 1.5Ghz PPC. Startup and shutdown varies by pretty much the percentage difference in the reported speed. Therefore, 50 seconds for XP on the 15" is about 90 seconds on the 17" for the same task.
Each test was run twice. On the 15" I started getting out of memory errors when trying to startup a new OS instance even though the OS was reporting only 450MB in use out of 2GB. After quitting and restarting Parallels, the problem went away.
After quitting Parallels, the 17" had about 130MB of additional residual memory still being used (535MB versus 404MB) although they both reported 235MB in use before starting Parallels.
I manually checked the processes and both are consuming varying amounts although the processes are similar. I don't know what all that means but there it is none the less. I'm curious is anyone else is getting results like this.
Last edited: May 16, 2006