2.3 16gb or 2.6 8gb rMBP

[EthosX]

Hi guys, wondering if I could get some suggestions on which rMBP to get;

I'm tossing up between the 2.3ghz with 16gb added (it's within my budget)

or the 2.6ghz with the base 8gb (16gb would be far to expensive).

Use would be 80% illustrator/photoshop and web design and a bit of xcode, rest of use would be gaming, browsing etc.

I currently have a 120ssd and a 320gig in my 13" 2009 mbp and I think I could handle a 256gb drive.

Any input would be valued, thanks.

Man get 2.6 + 6gb or 8gb best..

 

[Beta Particle]

2.3/16. everyone is talking about how you wont need 16gb of ram. But with the trends of everything becoming a background app to more cloud content, it's going to need more ram in order to work. my 2 cents.

Unless you are actually a professional user that does complex video rendering (just cutting or re-encoding a video won't eat up your RAM) heavy-duty photoshop work, or uses virtual machines all day, you're pretty much not going to have a need for more than 8GB RAM ever.

The speed bump from 2.3 to 2.6GHz on the other hand will improve just about everything you do on the computer.

Let's say you are waiting to re-paginate a 100 page manuscript or thesis and generate a table of contents. Let's hypothesize that this task takes, what, 30 seconds? I think that's a reasonable amount of time for our scenario. So if it takes 3 seconds longer, would you even care or notice? 2-3 seconds is probably the amount of time it took you to read that last sentence, so we're not talking about a lot. This could become a big deal if you render a lot of video, 3D images, etc., where time is money. Most users, however, will never note the difference in actual use.

I think more memory is a better strategy to future-proof yourself than a 10% increase in CPU speed.

Please actually monitor your RAM usage as you try most of these tasks. It's not even going to approach 8GB, let alone 16GB.

When you are actually doing complex computing tasks like rendering, or complex editing where things can take several minutes at a time (or hours, even) that speed bump is definitely noticed.

 

[liquidtwitch]

woooo, finally arrived. can't notice any screen lag (but i've read it's completely subjective) - i've put all the software i normally use and all my music and i still have 100gb free out of the 256gb.