MBA 13" 2012 i7: Low Windows 7 Benchmarks

Dear Community,

I have an MBA 13" 2012 i5 1.8GHz and i7 2.0GHz both with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD here for testing.

Geekbench 32bit results under OSX Lion are: 6202 for the i5 and 7027 for the i7 which both is pretty fine, I guess.

But Geekbench 32bit results under Win7 64bit showed the following: 5911 for the i5 and 4368 (!) for the i7. The slightly lower result under windows for the i5 seems to be ok for me, but such a low result for the i7 is astonished me and I am asking myself what the reason could be for that.

Does anybody of you have made similar tests and maybe could provide their results? Or have somebody an idea why this extreme drop in benchmark results is for the i7 from OSX to Win7?

By the way, I also ran the built in Win7 Benchmark tool which gave me the same strange picture: 6.9 Processor Score and 7.4 RAM Score for the i5 and 6.3 Processor Score and 7.2 RAM Score for the i7. The other results were the same for both machines.

Thank you for your Feedback!

KPOM said:

I haven't run Geekbench in Windows 7, but I can confirm that on the Windows Experience Index, the i7 CPU scored 6.3. It does seem a bit odd, but Windows itself seems to be running fine. Maybe run CPUID's CPU-Z application to see if the i7 is turbo boosting. Maybe it's something with the Boot Camp drivers.

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I think your guess was perfectly right. When I display the Core Speed of the i7 with CPU-Z while running Geekbench on it, it never goes over 1895MHz while the i5 in the same situation clocks to 2595MHz. According to the specs the i5 should turbo boost up to 2.8GHz and the i7 up to 3.2GHz, right?

You think the reason is a problem with the Boot Camp drivers? I downloaded them online with the Boot Camp Assistant of Lion (Rev. 4.0).

Maybe there is another interesting effect to mention: The i7 runs most of the time (maybe 9 of 10 seconds) with 1895MHz even when in idle and rarely steps down to 798MHz (maybe 1 of 10 seconds). The i5 instead runs most of the time (maybe 29 of 30 seconds) with 798MHz when in idle and very rarely steps up to 898MHz or 1298MHz (maybe 1 of 30 seconds).

RRKK said:

Hi,

give that you are so lucky to have both the i5 and the i7 versions would you be able to tell us something about whether there are any significant differences between the two in terms of temperature and battery life?

Does the i7 gets hotter under normal use? Does the battery last a shorter period of time?

Thanks a lot!

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Actually I did not stress test the two machines yet. But during installation and benchmark testing they both stay nicely cool - except a slim region near the hinge close to the bottom of the display gets a bit warm.

I am sorry, I have no experiences about battery life yet, but maybe this can help you: The tests I read about the 2011 13" MBA showed almost the same battery time for the i5 and i7 models. I guess this won't change with the new 2012 models.

theSeb said:

Have you checked the advanced power options in Windows? Make sure that everything is set for performance.

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Thank you very much for the tip. The above tests were run under the "balanced" energy setting. So I changed to "high performance" and run them again - unfortunately still the same behaviour.

KPOM said:

Well, I just encoded a DVD in Handbrake 0.9.6 in Windows 7 64-bit. On my 2011, that would cause the CPU to go into Turbo Boost for much of the encode. On my 2012, according to CPU-Z the i7 never went above 2.0GHz and spent most its time at 1.9GHz. I reported this to Apple, and will also send a message to AnandTech.

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Thank you very much for your investigations and doublechecking! On one hand I am glad, that you found the same effect (so it is not an individual problem of the machine I have) and on the other hand I am sad that we have to wait and see if Apple can resolve that problem.

Could you please let us know then what Apple and Anandtech replied?

Thank you very much again!

yoyoma1992 said:

Hi, since you have both i5 and i7, can you tell me if you feel any difference in just normal use? Like web browsing, watching video, playing some light games, viewing multiple excel/word/pdf and stuff like that? Like can you feel the i7 being faster in those tasks and if you think its worth the upgrade?

Thanks

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Hi, I am very sorry, I sent the i5 back already and kept only the i7.
But as I remember, the two versions were equal in terms of reactivity when I was starting them up, browsing the web, reading/answering emails or working on text or spreadsheet documents. However, I did not do some heavy workload tasks with them so far like video editing, gaming or things like that. I would assume that this is the kind of work where the computing power will make a difference. Hopefully the professional tests from Anandtech or others can tell us more about that. For me there was no remarkable difference between the two machines just doing office tasks.