i5 vs i7 w/ SSD Battery Life on 13", Intel GPU for Programming

atomicblokeatomicbloke
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
Hi,



I am a college student, studying Computer Science. I am looking to buy the 13" MBP, primarily for programming in Java, Python, Haskell, etc. I might also design some apps on the iOS SDK. I am not a pro in programming, still learning. I plan to get the 128 GB SSD, since I want reliability, and don't need to store movies, pics, etc. Battery life is very important to me.



My questions are:



* Will having the SSD instead of the spinning drive adversely affect the battery life?



* How much of a drop off in battery life will I see going from the i5 to the i7, given that the i7 is a faster processor? Is the improvement in performance and speed on the i7 worth the drop off in battery life?



*Also, how much will the lack of a discrete GPU affect me? None of my programming will be in computer graphics. The only games I (rarely) play are Civilization, SimCity, etc, no First Person Shooters. Might occasionally watch movies on DVD.



Any insights will be appreciated.



Thanks.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 1
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,324moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by atomicbloke View Post


    I plan to get the 128 GB SSD, since I want reliability



    SSD has reliability issues too - they stand up to knocks better but it's new technology and failure rates have been reported as comparable to current HDDs.



    They aren't worse in terms of reliability though and are considerably faster. Plus the 128GB is priced at $1.60 per GB (at least if you ignore the fact they take the old drive back first), which is decent value. The higher up ones, you pay well over $2 per GB.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by atomicbloke View Post


    * Will having the SSD instead of the spinning drive adversely affect the battery life?



    It depends, you probably won't see a difference:



    http://www.anandtech.com/show/2445/16



    It can go either way depending on if you do a lot of file access or not.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by atomicbloke View Post


    * How much of a drop off in battery life will I see going from the i5 to the i7, given that the i7 is a faster processor? Is the improvement in performance and speed on the i7 worth the drop off in battery life?



    Yes, in the case of the 13" MBP, the i7 is 40% faster and has the same TDP as the i5. You'd likely lose some battery life in the 15" jumping to the quad.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by atomicbloke View Post


    *Also, how much will the lack of a discrete GPU affect me? None of my programming will be in computer graphics. The only games I (rarely) play are Civilization, SimCity, etc, no First Person Shooters. Might occasionally watch movies on DVD.



    The HD 3000 is ok for games. Here is what it looks like playing Crysis on medium - average 20FPS or so:



    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUCmXwbsUec



    The complaint about it is that it's slower than the old 320M GPU, which gets 25FPS+ on medium in Crysis:



    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhNFDTBXpFI



    Even if it had been 10% faster it would have been fine but to drop lower when the 320M was just capable of playing modern games at decent quality is not that good. For casual gaming, it's still a capable GPU but there have also been some compatibility reports about graphics glitches appearing in certain games.



    Intel IGPs have been poor for such a long time that games manufacturers just don't even take them into consideration and some even put them on a blacklist that prevents the game even trying to run. The Ivy Bridge GPU should exceed the 320M and will bring quad-cores to the whole lineup so either by the end of this year or next year, there will be another MBP coming out that you can upgrade to if the current one has limits.



    The i7 13" with an SSD should do you just fine though.
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