Farin Fix Up Blog

by Anand Lal Shimpi on 6/12/2012 3:15 AM EST  Posted in Mac , Apple , MacBook Pro , notebook , laptops I'm in San Francisco until tomorrow morning, but aside from dinner I've been spending as much time with the next-gen MacBook Pro as possible. Apple, as always, has done an excellent job of giving users enough reasons to want this thing. There's the display for those who stare at their computers all day, there's the significant reduction in thickness and weight for those who want portability in a quad-core machine, and there's the significant GPU/SSD spec bump for those who crave performance. MacBook Pro with Retina Display Comparison   15-inch Mid 2012 MacBook Pro MacBook Pro with Retina Display Dimensions 0.95 H x 14.35 W x 9.82" D 0.71 H x 14.13 W x 9.73" D Weight 5.6 lbs (2.54 kg) 4.46 lbs (2.02 kg) CPU Core i7-3615QM Core i7-3720QM Core i7-3615QM L3 Cache 6MB 6MB 6MB Base CPU Clock 2.3GHz 2.6GHz 2.3GHz Max CPU Turbo 3.3GHz 3.6GHz 3.3GHz

Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 Vapor-X As we've already alluded to, Sapphire's Radeon HD 4850 Vapor-X sticks rigidly to AMD's reference clock speeds for this level of board, leaving us to focus instead on the use of a Vapor-X vapour chamber cooling solution on the card as its major selling point.  If you're looking for a more in-depth explanation of vapour chamber cooling and how it works, then you can find it here. Click for full-size image At first glance, the Radeon HD 4850 Vapor-X looks like it packs quite a big, bulky and hefty cooler (complete with 75mm fan), but this is actually belied by its relatively light weight.  That aside, what we have here is a pretty standard Radeon HD 4850 board design. Click for full-size image Taking a look at this board from the side, we can see that the actual mainstay of the cooler is reasonably small, with the rest of the body of the cooler designed to help exhaust hot air out of the rear of the chassis.  We can also see from