As you all know, Apple has released the new MacBook Air this year in June.
The design doesn't seem to change much from the previous MacBook Air models, but there are a few upgrades on the inside.
The new MacBook Air now has a Haswell microarchitecure compared to the previous model which uses Ivy Bridge. It also has a 128GB SSD storage, 4GB RAM, Intel HD 5000 IGPU and Intel Core i5-4250U CPU for the base model.
The Haswell processor in the new Air promises to give better performance along with a better battery life. The base 11-inch Air now can last up to 9 hours compared to the previous model, which can only last up to 5 hours.
On top of that, the Intel HD 5000 IGPU and Intel Core i5-4250U give performance boost around 15-30% on the new base model, a noticeable difference especially in gaming.
As for top clock speed, the 1.3 GHz Intel Core i5-4250U CPU can Turbo Boost itself up to 2.6 GHz if required. Although the Turbo Boost frequency is the same as the previous model (2.6 GHz), it means nothing as having Haswell microarchitecture on-board means it is undoubtedly faster.
As for top clock speed, the 1.3 GHz Intel Core i5-4250U CPU can Turbo Boost itself up to 2.6 GHz if required. Although the Turbo Boost frequency is the same as the previous model (2.6 GHz), it means nothing as having Haswell microarchitecture on-board means it is undoubtedly faster.
So, how well does the new MacBook Air handle gaming with all of these hardware upgrades?
I made some test videos using two video games, Call of Duty 4 and Mirror's Edge to find out.
Check out the videos that I made below. All the games ran on the MacBook Air with medium to high settings and with 720p resolution.
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