After a full month on Youtube my faux unibody MacBook Pro review has broke 7,000 views and has garnered over a hundred interesting comments. I didn’t know exactly what to expect when I posted the clip, just days after the notebook arrived in my hands, but I knew my review would stir the waters with its unorthodox mix of facts, fantasy and pure flame bait!

A few people seemed to have grasped that it’s impossible to take my review seriously if you actually consider what I’m saying and doing in the video (like ‘docking’ a load of Apple crap onto the display!), but apparently many others are completely oblivious that my piece is purposely ridiculous. Indeed, I didn’t want things to be too obvious. Where would the fun be in that?

What I was hoping for was to bait a variety of emotional responses, and judging by the vociferous nature of the comments posted thus far, I’ve certainly succeeded. From barely legible insults to congratulatory praise, I think I’ve heard it all. But the best comments are those that scold my incorrigible parlance to butcher the names of various Apple products and my inability to recognize that the English pronunciation of ‘aluminum’ is the exact same element used to make pop cans and car frames.

Right now I’m sort of torn between continuing with this series of misreviews or just keeping my content straight and honest (as it is with anything that I write for this blog). Having said that, it’s kind of hard to stop when I’m having this much fun and apparently entertaining a good portion of viewers as well!

A game that’s sure to get a lot of play on the PC this holiday season is Call of Duty: World at War (COD5). The multiplayer beta has been available for a few days, and already I’ve logged a good couple of hours in online matches.

COD5 is an excellent test for the late 2008 MacBook Pro’s discreet graphics chip. Overall, I found the nVidia 9600M GT to perform quite well, rendering the game with a high amount of detail at comfortable frame rates.

For the deathmatch purist, having beautiful graphics is a distant second to having silky smooth frame rates. For my tests, I kept this in mind, but I was also thinking about the single player aspect, where graphical detail is important for providing an engrossing experience.

Starting at the highest resolution, a native 1440 x 900, the game felt a bit choppy and textures looked flat and lifeless at their lower settings. Dropping down to 1280 x 720 and having the details maxed out to ‘extra’ produced a gorgeous palette of colors and textures, but the frame rate took a noticeable hit any time the scene had to render a lot of objects. Working down to 1152 x 864, I found this to be the lowest acceptable resolution for the MacBook Pro’s 15.4” screen; any lower and the graphics looked too blocky, muddy and aliased. At this resolution, I chose a combination of medium and extra detail settings. The result produced acceptable frame rates for online play with graphics still pleasing enough to showcase the 9600M GT’s abilities.

Further tweaking and running the final code of the game may produce even better results. I can’t wait for Call of Duty: World at War to be released now that I’ve tried the beta. It might just give COD4 a run for its money!

Slightly higher quality video here.

How does a new unibody Macbook Pro compare to an older Santa Rosa Macbook Pro when it comes to gaming? I put these two MBP’s to the test, running the Far Cry 2 benchmark for a head-to-head faceoff. The results were dramatic.

The late 2008 MacBook Pro loads the Far Cry 2 benchmark over 50% faster (37 seconds) than the older MBP model (58 seconds). One could say that the faster 2.53Ghz Penryn CPU trumps the slower 2.2Ghz Merom processor, but this alone can’t account for such a large discrepancy in loading times.

During the startup sequence for most games, vast amounts of data must be decompressed and transferred from the hard drive to the system RAM and video RAM. It appears that the 120GB Fujitsu HDD that comes standard in the older MBP is quite a bit slower than the 320GB HDD found in the latest MBP, although they are both rated at 5400RPM. In addition, the latest unibody notebooks feature a faster (1066mhz) system bus and use RAM operating at this high speed. These improvements combined, allow the newer MBP’s to internally transfer data faster than the older Santa Rosa based notebooks, which can lead to faster game loading.

During the actual game sequence, the late 2008 MacBook Pro produces much smoother frame rates than the older Santa Rosa model (averaging 30 FPS versus 18 FPS, under medium settings at native resolution). Similarly, in synthetic benchmarks, the 9600M GT outperforms the 8600 GT by around 45%.

For most modern games, the bottleneck in performance lies with the GPU. It is a bit surprising then, that the older 8600M GT performs so poorly compared to the 9600M GT, as both GPU’s are similar, and each have 32 shaders. Thus, it would appear that nVidia’s successor to the 8600M GT has 3D performance optimizations beyond its modest boost in core and memory frequency.

To get playable frame rates (29 FPS) on the 8600M GT, the screen resolution needs to be lowered to 960 x 600, but this also made the graphics look blocky and heavily aliased. Perhaps a significant contributor to the performance limitations of this particular GPU is its miniscule 128MB of VRAM. It would be interesting to benchmark a 512MB version of the 8600M GT to remove this variable.

So far, my findings indicate that those interested in gaming should definitely consider upgrading to the new unibody MacBook Pro; the speed benefits are greatly noticeable. In addition, it has been widely speculated that future driver support from nVidia will further enhance the GPU’s used in the Pro and also help to optimize its logicboard chipset. These parts are still very new and there is plenty of room for improvement. Geforce Boost anyone?

Do you own a MacBook Pro, new or old? How do you like it for gaming?

After a month of daily use, I’ve decided to post another video giving some thoughts on my now battle hardened iPod Nano 4G. There’s a few things to like, but plenty to hate of Apple’s newest sharp looking (and feeling) pocket player. I hope you enjoy my video review and creative commentary.