Ableton Forum

Yes - good shit - go buy it already!

Just got the 15" 2.2 Quad i7 with the 7200rpm drive. Absolutely loving it so far. Highly recommended.

Machinesworking wrote:

Anubis wrote: CPU = second gen. sandy bridge Core i5-2410(2.7-2.9 GHz!)not available in Macbooks yet

Not at all comparable to to a quad core i7, so you did not in fact save $2000.

Just for fun, the only Macbook Pro that costs $2000 more than your machine is a quad i7 chip at 2.2ghz which easily tops up to at least twice or three times faster than that laptop. Remember P4 chips topped out at over 3ghz 6 years ago, and were MUCH slower than a 1.8ghz centrino chip.
Plus it's a 17" screen model. Nice laptop, probably better than Apples low end, but their high end that you're comparing it to has always been decently priced for what you get.

I'm afraid you're wrong. You see the good thing about Wintel machines is that you have the freedom customize them. This i5 is currently running at 2.7 GHz and can reach 2.9GHz. Moreover in the MSI user forum, for peanuts(15 euros), they wrote me a custom BIOS. Originally the embedded graphics (Intel HD 3000) was locked down at 64 MB pre-allocated DVMT RAM. I've been reading about MacBook owners bitching about the poor graphics performance on their i5's and i7's. It's because they can't adjust the embedded GPU to it's max performance. Steve doesn't allow such freedom. I now have the liberty to change it to the maximum specification as per Intel. i.e.- I raised the dedicated base RAM to 512 MB and it can throttle up to 1.7 GB RAM! Sure it may not measure up to the top of the line i7's out there but as far as bang for-the-buck, it's an incredible value. The custom bios unleashed this machine and it's now a monster! I run a lot of problematic CPU hungry fx plugs(think TRacks3 with linear phase and oversampling enabled) and never a hiccup.

Total cost for ass kicking Windows 7 DAW: Laptop = $550, 750GB! 7200 rpm HDD = $90, 8GB 1333MHz RAM = $76. Net total = $716! You can only get a mid-range iPad for that in Mac land.