The BTO iMac's individual test results show that Macs with processors that have fewer cores but faster clock speeds still outperform Macs that have processors with more cores but slower clock speeds in many tasks. Our Finder, Pages, iPhoto, and Photoshop tests were faster with the dual-core iMac, but applications like Mathematicamark, Cinebench, and HandBrake that can take advantage of the quad-core i7's eight virtual cores were significantly faster on the MacBook Pro.

You can look at the BTO 15-inch 2.3GHz Core i7 MacBook Pro's individual test scores below. We also have a , if you're interested in seeing how the BTO 15-inch 2.3GHz Core i7 MacBook Pro compares to other Macs not listed here.

Speedmark 6.5 scores are relative to those of a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo Mac mini (Mid 2010) with 2GB of RAM, which is assigned a score of 100. We duplicated a 1GB file, created a Zip archive in the Finder from the two 1GB files and then unzipped it. We converted 135 minutes of AAC audio files to MP3 using iTunes' High Quality setting. In iMovie '09, we imported a camera archive and exported it to iTunes using the Mobile Devices setting. We ran a Timedemo at 1024-by-768 with 4X anti-aliasing on in Call of Duty 4. We imported 200 JPEGs into iPhoto '09. The Photoshop Suite test is a set of 23 scripted tasks using a 50MB file. Photoshop's memory was set to 70 percent and History was set to Minimum. For our multitasking test, we timed the Photoshop test again, but with the iTunes MP3 encoding and file compression tests running in the background. We used Handbrake to encode four chapters from a DVD previously ripped to the hard drive to H.264. We recorded how long it took to render a scene with multiprocessors in Cinebench and ran that application's OpenGL, frames per second test. We ran the Evaluate Notebook test in MathematicaMark 7. We ran the WorldBench 6 multitasking test on a Parallels 6 VM running Windows 7 Professional. We timed the import and processing time for 200 photos in Aperture.--Macworld Lab testing by James Galbraith, William Wang, and Mauricio Grijalva