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2.93 vs 2.66 Mac Pro 17 inch
- Thread starter alphakilo
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As all other threads along these lines, it depends on your usage. What are you going to use it for?
Do you think 270MHz is going to make a difference in your day to to day life? I doubt it but it depends on what you do. I've been over this about ten times with myself and I just can't justify that small jump for $300, and it's not really future proofing anything because it two years that little bump is not going to make that much of a difference.
Do this, launch Activity Monitor and watch it all day and tell us how many times the CPU comes close to 100%.
If you do encoding(audio, video) then probably but you should have a desktop for this anyway, otherwise it's not worth it [In my opinion].
Also, think of it like this. Take that $300 and put it in the bank, in two months when SSD's are lower you can purchase a decent one for that $300 which will give your computer a much much larger performance(noticeable) boost for the life of the machine.
Do this, launch Activity Monitor and watch it all day and tell us how many times the CPU comes close to 100%.
If you do encoding(audio, video) then probably but you should have a desktop for this anyway, otherwise it's not worth it [In my opinion].
Also, think of it like this. Take that $300 and put it in the bank, in two months when SSD's are lower you can purchase a decent one for that $300 which will give your computer a much much larger performance(noticeable) boost for the life of the machine.
Do this, launch Activity Monitor and watch it all day and tell us how many times the CPU comes close to 100%.
So your telling me a Pentium 4 will browse email and internet as fast as my quad core? even though doing those tasks will cause neither processor to reach 100% obviously not, the quad core will achieve it much faster. The extra speed will help, especially in the future and for gaming etc, however its not worth the $300 so unless you have that kind of money spare, dont spend it, however it is going to make a bigger difference than say the extra RAM(8GB).
Well, yes, I think you would be hard-pressed to notice a difference even on those machines but we're talking about a 2.93 vs a 2.66 and if you can notice a difference between those two reading email and surfing the net than you're some kind of super human. The speed difference is so very very very small [on small operations like reading email etc..] that it's not even close to noticeable. It only gets noticeable if you're maxing out the CPU for a long period of time and even then you might shave a few seconds of your total time. As far as gaming your GPU will hit it's limit before the CPU in either case.
If you have a quad-core and you're only using it to surf the web and check your email your got ripped off.