Users remove the clock limits and witness their frame rates shoot through the roof

Apple has been in the news a lot recently, both good and bad, but fortunately, most of the publicity has been good for Apple. Just several weeks ago, Apple launched a ground-breaking add-on to the Intel-based Macs that it was shipping which allowed the machines to boot Microsoft's Windows XP. This move alone boosted Apple's stock prices up an astounding 10% in a day.

Apple's MacBook Pros, which replace the PowerBook family has been receiving a lot of press too. The laptops themselves are great performers and best even the fastest available Windows notebooks on the market in many areas. Many MacBook Pro users have installed Windows XP and discovered that Windows XP runs extremely well. The MacBook Pro is the only notebook available that is able to fully run Apple's OS X and Windows XP natively.

Interestingly, upon installing Windows XP and its drivers, several users have noticed a startling discovery -- Apple has underclocked the included ATI Radeon X1600 chip. By default, the Radeon X1600 is clocked at 470MHz core and its memory also clocked at 470MHz. In the MacBook Pro, both are clocked at 310MHz and 278MHz respectively.

It is speculated that Apple has declocked the GPU and its accompanying memory in the MacBook Pro to conserve battery power as well as to reduce the amount of heat generated. Upon removing the clock rate cap, users have discovered that the MacBook Pro's internal fans spin up much more noticeably and battery life reduced by roughly 30 minutes. In a notebook that only lasts roughly 3 hours, 30 minutes is a lot of time.

No artifacts or abnormal behavior was noticed and some have said that they've noticed significant frame rate improvements after the Radeon X1600 was set to its normal specifications. More here.


Source : DailyTech