The latest entry-level MacBook rolled out by Apple a week ago offers more than just an improvement on the white laptop it replaces in Apple’s notebook line. According to Macworld Lab tests, this new system outperforms the 2GHz aluminum unibody MacBook that costs $300 more.

As you may recall, Apple closed the books on May with a quiet update of its $999 MacBook model. While leaving the price tag untouched, the company bumped the speed of the laptop’s Core 2 Duo processors from 2GHz to 2.13GHz and increased the hard drive capacity from 120GB to 160GB. The entry-level notebook also includes faster 800MHz DDR2 memory; the previous entry-level MacBook used 667MHz DDR2 RAM.

To measure the performance difference between the new white MacBook and its predecessor, we enlisted the help of Speedmark 5, Macworld’s overall system performance benchmark. In our tests we found the new 2.13GHz white MacBook to be approximately 6.5 percent faster than the 2GHz white MacBook the revamped machine replaces. The new model had faster test times across the board, including about an 8 percent boost in Photoshop times and iTunes MP3 encoding scores. Cinema 4D was about 5 percent faster on the new white MacBook.

This way for Macworld benchmarks