The 13-inch MacBooks now sport an 800MHz frontside bus and Intel's GMA X3100 integrated graphics video chip. Intel says the GMA X3100 employs more advanced pixel and vertex shaders, hardware transform and lighting acceleration, and better video decoding than its predecessor.
integrated graphics allow a computer to be built without a separate graphics card, which can lead to lower overall costs and lower power consumption -- but also weaker graphics performance. Integrated graphics rely on the computer's main memory for storage, which slows things down since both the CPU and GPU have to access memory over the same bus. GMA X3000's shader supports vertex and pixel Shader Model 3.0 features. Specifically, shading precision was increased to 32-bit floating point per vector.
The MacBook speeds have also been bumped slightly though pricing remains the same: 2.0GHz for US$1,099, 2.2GHz for $1,299 and 2.2GHz for $1,499.
When it comes to MacBook Pros, you can now upgrade both the 15-inch and 17-inch models with a 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo chip for US$250 and a 250GB Serial ATA Drive for $150. Pricing for the MB Pros are $1,999 for a 15-inch/2.2GHz model; $2,499 for the 15-inch/2.4GHz model; and $2,799/2.4GHz model.
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