9600M GT versus 8600M GT versus 9400M

I’m in the mar­ket for a new lap­top and I pur­pose­fully waited for the new Mac­Books to be released. I priced out a Dell XPS M1330 and once the fea­tures are matched up as close as I can make them, there’s a $60 price dif­fer­ence in favor of the Dell. $1599 vs $1533. The Mac­Book comes out ahead in GPU, FSB, and oper­at­ing sys­tem (OS X > Vista because of Unix) and the Dell comes out ahead in terms of con­nec­tors (HDMI, Firewire, card reader, Express­Card slot, etc.). I tried to con­fig­ure a com­pa­ra­ble Ubuntu machine, but the proces­sor speed is fixed at 2.0 GHz and eas­ily went over com­pared to the $1299 Mac­Book. The only com­peti­tor now is a late model 15″ Mac­Book Pro which for refurb starts at $1349—a very tasty price indeed. The MBP matches the advan­tages of the m1330 and has a bet­ter GPU, screen size, and res­o­lu­tion than the new Mac­Book. How much bet­ter is the GPU? Let’s see.

Based on the num­bers pro­vided by the keynote, the 9400M is 82% as good as the 8600M GT at best and 55% as good at worst. Look­ing at the num­bers on the Apple web­site, com­par­ing the new Mac­Book Pro to the new Mac­Book, the 9600M GT is 1.5 to 2.3 times bet­ter than the 9400M. I also looked at the bench­marks at Notebookcheck.com which say that the 9600M GT is 25% bet­ter than the 8600M GT and the 8400M is only 44% as good as the 8600M GT. So with all these rel­a­tive num­bers, the rank­ing is approximately:

If you’re not con­vinced, here’s the san­ity check… 67/80 ~= 82%. 44/80 = 55%. 100/67 ~= 1.5. 100/44 ~= 2.3. (100−80)÷80 = 25%.

So is hav­ing 1lb less weight and faster FSB and mem­ory at the cost of hav­ing a GPU that’s 55% to 82% as good, smaller screen/resolution, and less con­nec­tions worth an extra $250? I don’t plan to travel much, but when I do I like to travel light. I don’t plan to game, and I’m more likely to do more com­pu­ta­tion­ally inten­sive tasks than graphic inten­sive tasks. I also don’t own that many periph­er­als. While home, the lap­top will be hooked up to an exter­nal mon­i­tor. The new Mac­Book fits my needs bet­ter, but the late model Mac­Book Pro seems to be the bet­ter value. I’ve got the money sit­ting in the bank. Deci­sions, decisions.

UPDATE (04 Jan 2009): Two and a half weeks ago, I was hired by a com­pany as a con­trac­tor and they are pre­dom­i­nantly Macs. The fan on my old Com­paq seemed to be dying since the lap­top over­heats and freezes, so it had to be replaced. So I set­tled on pur­chas­ing a 15″ early-2008 Mac­Book Pro. My pri­mary rea­son was light­ing in the office was not con­ducive to a glossy screen and I got more bang for the buck with the MPB since there was very lit­tle per­for­mance advan­tages between the old and newer mod­els. Then of course I hear it’s not easy to drag & drop and use graphic edi­tors with the new track­pad. Plus I didn’t have to go through the added has­sle and expense of pur­chas­ing an adapter for hook­ing up to my mon­i­tor. For resale value, I opted to get the 2.5 GHz with 512MB video ram for $1499 since the hard drive and mem­ory can be upgraded later. In any case, it’s still cheaper than the 13″ 2.4 GHz Mac­book. How­ever, hav­ing trav­eled with this lap­top to LA and back, I have to say, a 13″ ver­sion would have been more com­fort­able to use on the plane. Here’s hop­ing Apple, brings back matte screens and low­ers the price on the 13″ models.