Which Laptop CPU works best for work with the Screaming Frog SEO Spider? I tested a Macbook Pro (M1 Pro), a Dell XPS (Intel i7) and an ASUS ROG (AMD Ryzen 9) against some old Macbook Airs and my Ryzen 9 Desktop PC. Please have a look at my little benchmark test here
Early in 2022, I needed a new laptop for work travel, as my old and tiny Apple Macbook Air (2012, running Windows) seemed to slow down a lot.
As I do SEO work, my main locally running software is the Screaming Frog SEO Spider, which is a great tool, but it also generates, computes and moves huge amounts of data when crawling/scraping big websites.
So I wanted to buy a a really fast laptop, mainly for the Screaming Frog spider. Most other things I do are browser based, no graphics, no video, no games. I do not really care if it is Windows or Mac – and the obvious choice of the day was the 2021 MacBook Pro with Apple M1 Pro Chip (10‑Core CPU und 16‑Core GPU) for about 2500€ (see here at Amazon.de)
However, it did not „feel“ quite right! It „felt“ much slower using the Screaming Frog SEO Spider than on my Desktop PC. So I decided to to this little benchmark, with some Laptops I could get my hand on:
- Benchmark is my 2021 windows 10 desktop PC: AMD Ryzen9 (3200MHz DDR4 CL16 DIMM 64GB, ASUS Prime B550 Mainboard, AMD RYZEN9 3900x AM4, Crucial P1 1TB CT1000P1SSD8 internal SSD- up to 2000 MB/s). Price: about 2000€
- 2021 MacBook Pro with Apple M1 Pro Chip (10‑Core CPU, 16‑Core GPU), about 2500€
- Old MacBook Air Early 2015, 1,6Ghz Intel Core i5, macOS Monterey, about 1200€
- Old MacBook Air 2012 with Windows 11, about 1200€
- Dell XPS13 9310, Intel® Core™ i7-1195G7, about 1400€
- ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (GA401QC-K2195T), AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS, about 1300€
This is the result of my benchmark:
To my surprise, there was a clear winner!
The tiny and light (1,3kg!) and relatively inexpensive (1400€) Dell XPS 13 9310 running on Intel i7 outperformed my other computers, including my fat, grey desktop machine for most tasks in my test. So this is the Laptop I will be using from now on when traveling!
The much praised Macbook Pro with the newest Apple M1 Pro Chip did OK, but was slower than my desktop PC when deleting data from crawls. Also it was slower than the dell and the Ryzen9 Asus Laptop. Also compared to my 10 year old (and much cheaper) Macbook Air, I expected much more!
Some words regarding my benchmark:
- The nice guys from Screaming Frog told me, that there is a native version for M1 coming with v17. see https://twitter.com/screamingfrog/status/1505918784812503040 (but I could not wait that long, so I had to give my new Macbook Pro back to the Apple shop – sorry for that, but given the high price, I was really disappointed with the performance!)
- I did not benchmark the crawling of websites – which obviously is the normal task for the Screaming Frog spider – because here the results would differ a lot depending on the current speed of my connection and the current speed of the crawled website.
- Instead, I performed tasks that take a long time on any machine: importing of big crawl files and deleting some data from loaded crawls (I do not know if that is the best way to do it, but that is what happens a lot in my daily work)
- I used the same basic settings on all computers: no other software running, and „storage mode“ in the Screaming Frog App set to database storage.
- I do not know that much about hardware, but maybe running on „memory storage“ could be faster. Or a combination of any CPU with an even faster SSD could be faster (but I worked with the hardware out of the box)
If you have any comments / suggestions, please leave a comment on twitter: https://twitter.com/davidfree/status/1526151532617555968
