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Peytah

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 20, 2009
25
0
Is there that much a difference between 2.2 and 2.5? Also keep in mind that I'm a Graphic Designer. This is the first laptop purchase I'm making. I already know that 4GB of ram is a must.
 

Theclamshell

macrumors 68030
Mar 2, 2009
2,741
3
no, you will not notice the difference between those too clock speeds. What computer are you interested in?
 

m85476585

macrumors 65816
Feb 26, 2008
1,226
4
That's a 12% difference, which you will probably never notice. It looks like you are looking at the 13", which both have the same GPU, so that won't matter either.

Go with a solid-state drive if you can afford it, and you might even consider 6-8gb of RAM. For both of these I recommend installing it yourself.
 

63dot

macrumors 603
Jun 12, 2006
5,269
339
norcal
HD space and RAM are far more important than the differences of the speeds you mention.
 

sth

macrumors 6502a
Aug 9, 2006
571
11
The old world
You won't notice a few hundred Mhz more or less. It's more important to have enough RAM (I wouldn't go for less than 4gb atm) and a fast hard-disk (7200rpm or, even better, a SSD drive). A fast graphics card doesn't hurt, even when not using the machine for gaming (OpenCL comes to mind).

A real-world example: I have a 4 year old PC (Athlon64) which I mainly use for gaming. I recently upgraded it to 4gb RAM and a new graphics card and it now easily runs current games at very high settings despite having a totally outdated CPU.
 

melman101

macrumors 68030
Sep 3, 2009
2,751
295
Wow, I can't believe the number of threads in the last day just on this issue alone. I personally went for the 13" 2.53 myself.

melman101
 

sth

macrumors 6502a
Aug 9, 2006
571
11
The old world
Even going 2.53 to 2.8 gives a 10% boost or so just with a CPU change.
Yes, because 2.8 is ~10% more than 2.53 BUT
a) More and more programs will do CPU-intensive tasks such as filters or encoding/decoding on the graphics card, which can be many times as fast as the CPU for those things
b) You won't notice those 10% except when sitting next the computer with a stopwatch
c) It does CPU-intensive tasks a tiny bit faster but in the real world, your CPU is sitting idle most of the time

BTW: When it comes to general responsiveness of the system, the best thing you can do at the moment is getting a good SSD drive. They're very expensive, though.
 
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