We managed to get our hands on a swanky new, totally tricked out, top of the line MacBook Pro with Retina Display (and, oh, 16GB of RAM) on Wednesday and have been putting it through the paces over the last 24 hours. The full review is coming soon, but we thought we'd tease you a bit with some mind-blowing benchmark results...

The star of WWDC 2012 was without a doubt the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display, which went from myth to reality on Monday. While iOS 6 also looks like a winner, we have a long wait ahead of us until the fall to actually install it, while the MacBook Pro with Retina Display went on sale the same day as the keynote, June 10.

Well, in theory, anyway. We placed an online order for ours shortly after the Apple Online Store reopened for business on Monday, which quoted 5-to-7-day availability. Much to our surprise, our unit -- built to order with 2.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 and 16GB RAM -- shipped from China that same evening and was in our hands a mere 36 hours later and ready for some benchmark tests.

Geekbench

Let’s cut to the chase: Our MacBook Pro with Retina Display scored 13,522 using 64-bit mode on Geekbench (we also ran the test in 32-bit mode, where it scored 12369). According to Primate Labs’ own Mac benchmarks, the only Mac that smokes this notebook is the higher-end Mac Pro -- not really a surprise, given that the MacBook Pro is using four cores, while the Mac Pro features double or even triple that amount.

Just below our customized MacBook Pro with Retina Display is the stock 2.6GHz model, which clocks in at 13,063; the next notch down is a mid-2011 iMac 27-inch with a score of 12,519.

And The last time we reviewed a MacBook Pro, the 15-inch 2.2GHz Core i7 with 4GB of RAM, released in late 2011, it achieved a Geekbench score of 10,259.

Call of Duty 4

We also fired up a copy of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Multiplayer to get a sense of how the Nvidia GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory could handle such high-intensity action.

All four consecutive tests were nothing if not consistent: We clocked a rate of 88.2 frames per second the first time around and 88.5fps on the next three tests. And hey, the graphics looked pretty sweet, even being pixel-doubled for the Retina Display. (The last MacBook Pro we reviewed in late 2011 hit 82.7 frames per second.)

Startup

While many MacBook Pro lovers might lament losing the larger-capacity, cheaper-to-replace internal hard disk that has been a staple of the notebook line since its inception, once you boot up the machine, it becomes extremely obvious that flash storage is where it’s at.

We’ve gotten used to ridiculously long boot times on our 27-inch iMac (mid-2010), which we blame on lazily porting our data from Mac to Mac over the years, as well as simply having too many doggone background tasks running at launch. Most days we fire it up and walk away to take a bathroom break or grab something to drink before starting our work day -- five or so minutes later, we’re usually good to go.

To make a fair comparison, we loaded this new Retina MacBook Pro with almost all of the same menu bar items, with the only key difference being that we started from scratch rather than using a backup from our trusty workhorse iMac. The results were staggering, and we had to do a double (or triple) take.

Even with plenty of background tasks and open apps resuming, the MacBook Pro with Retina Display started up cold in an alarmingly quick 20.3 seconds -- and that includes auto-mounting three network-attached storage drives. By comparison, our mid-2010 iMac takes a minute and 35 seconds just to get to the Apple logo, and usually isn’t ready to actually use until several minutes later.

Make no mistake: The hard drive is dead, it just doesn’t know it yet.

Disk and Copy Speeds

Rapid-fire boot time aside, we were equally blown away by the insanely fast read and write times produced by our 512GB flash storage. As you can see from the above test, using the free Blackmagic Design Disk Speed Test app, we clocked as much as 403.9MB per second write and a whopping 440.8MB per second read -- more than enough to successfully play or record all but the largest uncompressed video.

Apple Senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller noted during the WWDC 2012 keynote that the next-gen MacBook Pro's flash storage is capable of up to 500MBps transfer rates, and he surely wasn’t joking.

We also grabbed a few external hard drives for comparison, including a 3TB Seagate GoFlex Desk using the company’s new Thunderbolt Adapter. Using a third-party StarTech Thunderbolt cable, we clocked 93.7MBps write and 92.2MBps read, a decent boost over the 50.6MBps write and 76.5MBps read the same drive accomplished on the iMac using FireWire 800.

The MacBook Pro with Retina Display’s USB 3.0 also impressed us. Using a LaCie 500GB portable hard drive, we clocked 77.9MBps write and 79.0MBps read.

USB 3.0 also made short work of copying files. We copied a 29.85GB ProRes 422 QuickTime movie from the LaCie drive to the internal SSD of the MacBook Pro in less than seven minutes -- a feat our iMac took almost 17 minutes to accomplish using USB 2.0.

Finally, copying a 125GB ProRes 422 movie file from the external 3TB Seagate to the internal SSD over Thunderbolt took about 20 minutes versus the same task on the iMac using FireWire 800 at 32 minutes.

(We’re not yet sold on this StarTech Thunderbolt cable, so we’re going to hunt down an Apple-branded cable and run the same tests again when time allows. We’ll be sure to update if the speeds improve.)

Battery Life

Last but not least comes that all-important battery life. While Apple didn’t necessarily improve on their promised “up to seven hours wireless web” claims with the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display, the fact that they managed to keep that benchmark at all is certainly impressive enough given the bright, beautiful high-resolution display.

Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to get seven hours of battery life in the two tests we had time for -- but considering the abuse we put the notebook through, our results are still pretty impressive.

For our first battery test, we managed right around five hours of battery life while installing software, downloading updates, checking email and Twitter and generally pounding pretty heavily on the machine the whole time. There were some periods where we were downloading while the display went to sleep, but otherwise we used it pretty consistently. The MacBook Pro initially showed nearly eight hours when we first unplugged it, but keep in mind the first battery drain usually helps calibrate the battery accordingly.

The second time around, we primarily looped an DVCPro HD QuickTime file using QuickTime Player X from 8am until the MacBook Pro forcibly went to sleep around 12:46pm -- a pretty reasonable four hours, 46 minutes of constant use with the screen on the entire time.

One final note: On the first battery life test, we used the MacBook Pro with Retina Display in our lap for the first few hours and it barely got warm to the touch. Compared to the last notebook we owned (a late-2008 15-inch MacBook Pro), that’s a small miracle -- older MacBooks get so hot after an hour of use that they’re generally too warm to hold on your lap, which is definitely not the case here.

Stay tuned for the full review in Mac|Life and here on MacLife.com!

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