New MacBook Pro benchmarked within Boot Camp

It's a shame the test (or the review) wasn't more comprehensive to include how friggin' hot this computer gets when running XP in Boot Camp. What some users have referred to as a "better than PC" execution of Windows, I believe is actually a ham-handed attempt. The most frequent rebuttal is, of course "well who uses Windows anyway? It's a Mac, use OS X!" but then, if a need wasn't identified, Boot Camp would never have been created. This 2.8 MPB is my first Mac after previously owning three PCs, and I was lured into purchasing it partly because of the enamored description by many of the MPBs dynamic ability to run both its native Leopard as well as Windows in via Boot Camp. I do not, however, agree that lap-burning temperatures, the failure to utilize the energy-efficient 9600M GPU, horrible right-click touch pad support and utterly dismal battery-life numbers make for a dynamic MacBook Pro at all.

ZeroCorpse - I am curious in what ways your consider your MPB to be superior to your previous PCs in running Windows XP ... I am genuinely curious.

Eh, whenever benchmarks are done, they *ALWAYS* use the game at the highest settings.

It's a stress test.

I wouldn't say the MBP is garbage based on it's performance on crysis.

FWIW, no Apple computer can play Crysis on it's highest settings at native res.

Hmmm. Aside from this being a bogus test, does anyone have any input as to how their new MBP is behaving with XP running in Boot Camp?

I bought a new MB and returned it because Boot Camp simply couldn't handle running XP without crashing. Little did I know, the new MBP isn't much better. I STILL haven't been able to keep XP running in Boot Camp without catastrophic crashes...

You cant even quote your own references correctly.
"..the 50 fps you can get ..." but none of benchmarks actually reach 50 fps!
Go back to school, You need it.

If the new MBPs are like my (older) one, then the video card comes underclocked. A quick fixer with ATI Tray Tool gave me a +17fps performance boost in HL2Ep2.

Battery life might suffer a little, yeah, but I'm not exactly playing this on the road, and I've got a decent cooling solution for the increased heat.

What does "within boot camp" mean? I don't use Boot Camp - I go for the Parallels virtual machine - but I thought that Boot Camp simply was simply a toggle switch. Isn't the test really just a test of the new MPB's hardware capabilities? What does Boot Camp have to do with it? (Maybe my understanding of this has always been wrong - I've assumed that Boot Camp is only needed if one wants to toggle, and that if somebody really wanted to, they could actually just nuke the hard drive and turn the machine into a pure, Windows - or Linux, for that matter - only unit.)

Enlighten me!

Has Apple even released updated Boot Camp drivers for these machines? That might be partially responsible for the slow performance.

Seriously... we're taking a laptop with a 9600GT and comparing that to a desktop with an overclocked 8800 Ultra running at high settings?

Can somebody explain how this test was [I]ever[/I] relevant?

I don't seem to have a problem playing Fallout 3, Crysis, or Left 4 Dead on my new MacBook Pro.

A 9600 is not a "shiny new graphics chip." It's an low-end card that is basically a rebranding of the 8000 series. There have already been articles with gaming benchmarks in things like Spore. That's about what you can expect to play with a Mac laptop. Nothing wrong with that either - it's the best card we've had in a portable yet.

Why do we keep doing useless 3D benches on Macs? This article gets republished in some form every time a new Mac is release, and the results are all exactly the same. There are plenty of great games you can play on a Mac. Crysis is not one of them. And we knew that a long time ago.