Unsurprisingly, the auto-switching is only available when running Apple's MacOS – under Windows the GeForce chip is permanently enabled. It will also prove handy in applications with GPU-acceleration support, such as recent versions of Photoshop. You’ll need to drop detail levels in graphically intense games, with the GT330M producing a nearly playable frame rate of 27.5fps in Call of Duty 4. This gives you both the power efficiency of the integrated Intel chip and the graphics performance of the dedicated GeForce GT330M chip as you need them. The MacBook Pro can automatically switch between its two graphics chips. Nevertheless, the MacBook Pro is clearly very fast at running today's applications although the underside did become uncomfortably warm when doing so. This is due to the 620 M's higher clock speeds and the fact that most software still isn't optimised for extra processor cores. This is actually a bit faster than a laptop equipped with a quad-core i7-720QM chip. Paired with 4GB of RAM, the MacBook scored 105 in our video-encoding test, 135 in our image editing test and an overall score of 103. The switch from four cores to two doesn't affect performance as much as you might think. This new chip only has dual processing cores, while previous Core i7’s were all quad-core, yet another infuriating and confusing twist in Intel’s barmy chip naming strategy. Apple's latest 15in MacBook Pro is the first laptop we've tested to use one of Intel's latest Core i7 processors – in this case a 2.66GHz i7-620M.

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