Hey guys, this is Austin and today I’m here with a test of the
2012 MacBook Air. For starters we’ll be doing a boot test and
here the Air is extremely fast, only taking just over 13 seconds
to boot. This is mostly due to the faster SSD that makes opening
apps very quick. Next up we have Novabench which is a general
test of performance. With 8GB of RAM, the Core i5 and 128GB Toshiba
SSD here the MacBook Air notched a score of 633 which is a decent
improvement over the 542 score of the last gen Air.
Moving right along we have the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test to see
exactly how fast the SSD is. Write speeds generally hovered around
350MB a second and topped 460MB a second for reads which isn’t far
off from the fastest full size SSDs on the market today.
For graphics I used Cinebench which runs through a scene of a car
chase and records the frames per second. While the Intel HD 4000
graphics are much better than the last MacBook Air the benchmark is
only able to wrap up with 15 fps which is far off from a laptop
with a high end dedicated graphics. Next we have a gaming demo with
Minecraft. As you can see the Air handles the game no problem and
although I did turn the render distance down a bit everything else
works maxed out. Of course if you’re on a crazy server you may need
to turn a few things down but overall I had no problems.
Moving on we’ve got Portal 2. Surprisingly this runs on the MacBook
at native resolution with all settings turned up except for
anti-aliasing. From time to time the framerate did dip below 30 fps
but overall I was quite impressed and it became perfectly smooth by
bumping the settings down very slightly. Lastly we have a test of
the video editing chops. This is a one minute 1080p clip dropped
into Screenflow and exported at 720p. The Air did respectably well
here taking just over 3 minutes and you can cut that down a good bit
by moving to 720p. I’ll also shut up for a minute so you can hear
the fan noise. Overall while it can’t compete with the new Retina
MacBook Pro the 11” Air is a very fast portable machine that can
handle moderate video editing and even a bit of gaming. If you guys
enjoyed this video be sure to leave it a thumbs up and if you’re
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