Prince McLeanApple is trading graphics performance for battery life with its new line of Intel-based MacBook Pro notebooks.
The modifications cripple the speed of the graphics processor by about 34 percent and the memory by 41 percent.
Users discovered the change after installing Microsoft's Windows XP (with the help of Apple's Boot Camp software) and running a third party application called ATITool (0.25).
By sacrificing graphics performance, Apple was able to improve the MacBook Pro's battery life and keep the units near-silent.
Some daring MacBook Pro users successfully used the third party ATITool software to uncap the full potential of the ATI chip. They found it reduced the battery life of their MacBook Pro by about 30 minutes, but did not over heat the notebooks or cause any other side effects such as display artifacts.
However, one user said the uncapping "took only couple of seconds" to cause the system's cooling system fan to spin at a speed he "never experienced before."
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86 Comments
First of all, I'd like to say that I'm all for this. I'd rather have a laptop that runs as silently as possible, and trade some performance for longer battery life.
That being said, wouldn't it be cool if Apple offered an "overlooking" tool, like ATI does? That way, if you want to squeeze every last frame per second out of Quake 4, you could, and than clock it back to the "recommended" state.
I'd like to know, how other Laptop-Manufacturer handled this problem? It seems, that the ATI graphic-card is a bit too hot for Notebooks!
...That being said, wouldn't it be cool if Apple offered an "overlooking" tool, like ATI does? That way, if you want to squeeze every last frame per second out of Quake 4, you could, and than clock it back to the "recommended" state.
This would be very neat if Apple were to somehow offer this.
Yeah! this is good news for us laptoppers that want a silent environment.
However the best would be to solve it like they do with the processor:
Processor performance: highest or reduced.
GPU performance: highest or reduced.
I would always go with reduced GPU until I really needed a massive on screen feedback, like in Motion or while gaming.
Other manufacturers have noisy laptops, thats how they handle it.
I think the ideal solution would be for the graphics processor to only run at full specs when absolutely needed, some sort of automatic sliding scale of performance verses power consumption. This would be Apple's style, I'm disappointed in them.