Baumblog EST 1968 - A blog for the Baumbachs who originated in Syracuse, NY

You are looking at the new sheriff in town, and this sheriff resides with me in Rochester. For any technology lover, this is one hell of a machine. It not only is faster than my quad core workstation in EVERY aspect (video editing, 3D rendering, Application response) it took on the Xeon 8-core Mac Pro's from last year and beat them in a few tests.

This thing is sick. 17", 8MB LS3 Cache, 2.3Ghz Quad Core, Hyperthreading simulates 8 cores, with speed boost that automagically overclocks this baby from 2.3GHz to 3.4Ghz on demand. 8 Gigs of Ram, 1GB Video Card and separate onboard graphics card to save battery power, Solid State Hard drive delivers unprecedented application response (aka, I was able to open every single Adobe Application in the time it took my co-workers Macbook Pro to open just Photoshop).

This is one Mac, even a die-hard PC'er can't dis...and if I want, I can dual boot this with Windows or Mac and switch between the two OS systems without restarting. Welcome my friend...welcome.

Marc said about 1 hour later

Welcome back to Apple.

Also, thanks for finding a bug in the Baumblog lol. Why you gotta be floating images to the left? :)
GJ said about 9 hours later

Darcy's Lenovo, purchased last spring, has the same 2.3 quad with hyperthreading. Who is your god now? :)
GJ said about 9 hours later

Oh, and last I checked, SSD hard disks are still very, very unreliable. Did that change recently, or did you buy a good backup solution to go along with this?
Geoff said about 16 hours later

Do you know if Darcy's overclocks itself? It is a killer chipset. I'm blown away how fast this thing is. The new SSD drives now support TRIM which is supposed to improve reliability. Honestly, the only thing I've got on this SSD is the OS itself, it's not a large drive so all my client files reside on separate drives (I've got it backed up on 2 external drives, and 2 internal drives...so I'm pretty well covered).

The SSD is quite new so this was more of a test to see how well it works. I ripped the internal HD that came with my laptop and installed it in a Seagate GoFlex external enclose which is super tiny. Great portable solution. The only problem I am really having is trying to get the proper expresscard so I can get superfast speeds (USB 2.0 isn't real great)

I first tried a slim eSATA expresscard, but it wasn't powered so it would not boot my external drive (which is powered by the connect cable). Then I tried USB 3.0 expresscard but that didn't provide enough juice either (which it had a 5V port to boost power, but of course, no cable). So this time I ordered a USB 3.0 expresscard WITH the cable. Hopefully that will do the trick.

I'm interested to see how the new Thunderbolt port will play out. I used that port to send a HD video signal to a 2nd display but it is quite quick for file transfer too. I imagine the drives for that early on will be expensive. Overall though, a nice piece of equipment.
GJ said 3 days later

No, it doesn't overclock itself. However, that's more of a software upgrade than a hardware spec. In other words, the CPU isn't new, it's just enhanced a bit with custom code (likely at the bios level, not the OS). We're not at the point we need to really be thinking about overclocking Darcy's laptop (which actually dates back more than a year, as Darcy reminded me yesterday), as the CPU is hardly the bottleneck on the machine. Windows 7 is. :)

Sounds like a nice machine, but knowing how Apple overprices the crap out of things, I'm guessing this was at least $1500, likely even more.