My research lead me to http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php which has great data on the relative CPU performance.

Exhibit 1: My Q9550 Processor vs. i7-3770k vs. i7-3930k
 I am happy to see that in the past three years CPU performance within a sane budget is about 2.5 times higher and with a budget stretch you could get 3.2 times the performance.

Exhibit 2: My Macbook Pro 13″ P7550

On the laptop side it scales roughly the same. If I want to keep the 13″ Macbook I can get about a 2.5 times increase in performance and if I go up to the maxed out 15″ macbook pro I can get 4.95 times the performance of my current laptop.

The new high end 13″ Macbook competes with my current desktop on the CPU side (GPU is way less) and the 15″ Macbook nearly doubles it! I am also debating ditching my desktop and going with a laptop only.

Now I have to figure out if an upgrade is worth it and is so which one. Game creation tools are fun!

Mac Stores are Awesome – Love it.

I really have to say that Mac Stores make the buying experience easy and exciting. They have every model available and you can see everything you are interested in buying. This made my debate between the 15″ and the 13″ easier to handle. I have to give them a 10/10 for the store experience.

OSX Initial Impressions – Hate it.

First I hated it. The keyboard layout (control key is in the wrong place!), application control (odd folders, not really like start menu). Clicking on the keypad (needs physical click, right click took me a bit to figure out).

Configured a few things that helped like tap touching the keypad. Then I made the mistake of trying to get Wine running next.

Everything worked great to get Steam installed but literally NOTHING ran for me out of Wine without major issues (even Wolf3D!). After trying this for a few hours over a few days I gave up on it for now and decided to install the SSD instead.

MacBook Pro 13″ + OCZ Vertex SSD = Initial Configuration NIGHTMARE. Hated it.

I had read a couple of places that there might be issues installing SSD’s on the macbook both because of the SSD firmware version and because of the Mac books throttled SATA interface. I was to excited to prep for any of this and just ripped my case open to slap the new drive in. Sadly I didn’t have the T6 screw driver that I needed so this was delayed a couple of weeks. After that I popped the drive in, slapped the OSX install disk in and I was super excited. Then the install failed.
And it failed again the second time.
Read some forums…try minimal install.
Failed again. And now it doesn’t even recognize the drive as a valid partition…great.
Hmmm…read deeper into some technical forums and found three possibilities:

1. Update the drive firmware.
2. Update the mac driver for SATA
3. Hold some magical key combination to clear out some kind of cached memory at boot up [Check this link out and search for "Resetting PRAM and NVRAM" for the key combination]

My scientific background wanted to try these one at a time. So I found a way to burn the driver update, ran the program and it told me I was already on the latest flash. Ok…why bother re-installing then? Might as well flash the mac. Slap in the old HD, run the update…it says I don’t need to. Ok…why bother re-installing? Put the SSD back in, hold down three magical keys and try the install again. Works fine and super fast. Great! I have no idea if step 1 or 2 actually flashed it and I have no idea why the third step worked but I now have a crash free Mac with a fast SSD.

Fast Boot and Wake up times – LOVE IT!

Launching applications, copying files and doing anything HD intensive is a dream on the new drive and it is silent! I’m loving what the hardware can do and how little time is spent waiting for anything except network traffic!

Post Install Thoughts – Warming up to loving Mac

After having issues installing the operating system and getting everything running I was a little worried I would regret the purchase. After using OSX for awhile and mostly using the machine for the usual web browsing and photo editing I am really enjoying it. I am even considering not installing windows because I don’t think that I will game on the laptop very much given that I will be moving into a bigger place and will be taking my desktop out of storage. One of the advantages of not having games on the laptop is that I may be more likely to make some of my own! That leads to some comments about continuing this blog.

Long Time, No Posts – Hate that!

The last few weeks have been hectic for me selling my place and buying a new one. I move in a few weeks and then I should have a longer commute that will let me work on my projects more (I hope!). This laptop purchase may be a bit of a hit in terms of my development because the popcap framework doesn’t run under OSX. In addition to that I think I may have caught the iPhone/iPod Touch development bug and may explore what I can do on that device. Hopefully I will be posting again more regularly in the near future.

Did my new apple keyboard satisfy my cravings?
No.

Did my new Razer Solmosa mouse satisfy my gadget needs?
No.

Did my new Steelseries glass mouse pad slow down my need to purchase gadgets?
No.

Did my BRAND NEW OCZ Vertex SSD drive satisfy my gadget needs?
YES! For now..

120GB OCZ Vertex SSD

I have a brand new OCZ Vertex SSD drive with no computer to put it in and it is the most exciting purchase that I have made in years. I’m not actually sure if I am more excited about the drive than a new laptop. This doesn’t make rational sense as having your boot times going from 1:30 to 0:30 wouldn’t be worth it to most people for the $349 Canadian that I spent on the drive…however for some reason it is the perfect gadget as SSD is probably the most significant advance in computer technology in years. I’m not deterred by the fact that it looks like a magazine bundled insert, that it weighs next to nothing and looks simple. This is a true gadget. Now I just need to find a place to put it.

What laptop will I buy?

I currently run on an aging Sony Vaio T140p that I bought a a job changing present for myself about four and half years ago. The little beast cost me about $2500 back then and I have loved having it for the last four years. I am hoping that my next laptop will last about 4-5 years as well and I am willing to spend about the same. Having friends making iPhone/iPod Touch games and playing them really makes me think that a MacBook Pro might just be the ticket.
I was initially going to go with the 13″ MacBook Pro but the reports that the screen has 6-bit processing has turned me off of it. I think the 17″ is to big and way overpriced so I will most likely end up with one of the 15″ models if I go the MacBook Pro route. If I do take the plunge it will be next weekend.

Laptop options

1. MacBook Pro 15″
2. Dell XPS 16″
3. Sony FW

Stay tuned

Sadly this game making hardware obsession will take a dent out of any of the ongoing game projects. I will take a technical bend in profiling and setting up the machine in the next few weeks worth of posting. Oh…and I sold my house in the last couple weeks and will be moving so my posts will be a bit more erratic in the next little while…

If you have any advice for laptops or suggestions please fire them my way.