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2018 MBP 15"Base(i7/16gb/256) vs Mid (i7/16gb/512) - Which one to buy?

D

DaveMike11

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 26, 2014
142
10
Hello everyone,

I'm planning to purchase the 2018 MBP this week at Best Buy in the US which has only these 2 options available now. I have been a windows user all along and this would be my first Apple computer.

I need some help to choose the correct one for me. I'm deciding if the 2018 MBP 15"Base(i7/16gb/256) will be good enough for me or should i go for the mid model which is i7/16gb/512.

This computer will be used primarily for daily my uses. I'm a photo hobbyist and i will be photo & video editing with Lightroom, Photoshop CC and video editing on FCP or Premier Pro CCI will also use it for little gaming used by my son like Fortnite.

Which is among the 2 choices will better suit for me? Will the Base model be good enough assuming i manage the storage options externally or is the mid model best configuration.

Which one would you pick and if you dont mind explain the reason for it?

Thanks in advance.
 
There isn’t a whole lot of difference with the CPU upgrade between the two. The biggest difference is in the storage - 256Gb can get cramped pretty quickly.

Also, there is a decent improvement in GPU going from the Radeon Pro 555x to the Radeon Pro 560x. Not sure this will make much of a difference for your work, but will be better for Fortnite...
 
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I'd say get the 2.6 with the 512gb for storage. If you're going to have a lot of raw photo finals and games. It's nice to have the storage.

I personally went for the 2.2 and upgraded my storage. There's not much difference in the 2.2 vs 2.6.
 
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Or go with the base model and add a 1TB Samsung T5 for next to nothing compared to what Apple is charging for the 256GB upgrade.

Edit: That's what I did, but I also own two beefy desktops at work and at home for very heavy lifting and file storage.
 
Thanks guys for your reply .
When i went to the store to check it out. The Best Buy guy said the base mode's graphics card is not that good & it has only 2GB RAM on the AMD Radeon Pro 555X whereas on the Mid model he said it had better graphics card with 4GB RAM. If its a big upgrade then i thought its worth it paying $400 more. What do you guys think on the GPU between these two items?.

Let me know.
 
DaveMike11 said:
Thanks guys for your reply .
When i went to the store to check it out. The Best Buy guy said the base mode's graphics card is not that good & it has only 2GB RAM on the AMD Radeon Pro 555X whereas on the Mid model he said it had better graphics card with 4GB RAM. If its a big upgrade then i thought its worth it paying $400 more. What do you guys think on the GPU between these two items?.

Let me know.
Click to expand...

555x with 2GB RAM is plain wrong. Both 555 and 560 come with 4GB VRAM.
 
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happyhippo1337 said:
Or go with the base model and add a 1TB Samsung T5 for next to nothing compared to what Apple is charging for the 256GB upgrade.

Edit: That's what I did, but I also own two beefy desktops at work and at home for very heavy lifting and file storage.
Click to expand...

Thats actually pretty legit. Way to save some serious cash.
 
DaveMike11 said:
Thanks guys for your reply .
When i went to the store to check it out. The Best Buy guy said the base mode's graphics card is not that good & it has only 2GB RAM on the AMD Radeon Pro 555X whereas on the Mid model he said it had better graphics card with 4GB RAM. If its a big upgrade then i thought its worth it paying $400 more. What do you guys think on the GPU between these two items?.

Let me know.
Click to expand...
Be careful with Best Buy employees. They are very well-intentioned, but often wrong. As of the 2018 refresh, both the 555X and 560X have 4GB VRAM. That being said, still a decent bump in performance when moving up to the 560X.
 
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I have 2.2 with 555x, when gpu is loaded it holds the base clock steady at 75C and 35W. So there is some headroom left for 560x. But - even if the CPU usage is almost zero the CPU also gets to 75C. So in case of gaming I’m not sure there will be a lot of difference between 560 and 555, even small CPU usage will bring the system again to the thermal limit. But there will be visible difference between the two GPUs in benchmarks or pure OpenGL/metal use cases.
 
Heres a question. SolidWorks primarily uses OpenGL. Could the i9 shine more between the other iterations when it comes to OpenGL?

Interesting because all these tests online are based off Cinabench and intensive video editing testing.

How about CAD?
 
Thysanoptera said:
I have 2.2 with 555x, when gpu is loaded it holds the base clock steady at 75C and 35W. So there is some headroom left for 560x. But - even if the CPU usage is almost zero the CPU also gets to 75C. So in case of gaming I’m not sure there will be a lot of difference between 560 and 555, even small CPU usage will bring the system again to the thermal limit. But there will be visible difference between the two GPUs in benchmarks or pure OpenGL/metal use cases.
Click to expand...

Thanks for sharing the information. Gaming would be light use only not heavy though. But i would be using more Lightroom & photoshop CC on this Macbook. I'm trying to justify the extra cost for the mid model.
 
Thysanoptera said:
I have 2.2 with 555x, when gpu is loaded it holds the base clock steady at 75C and 35W. So there is some headroom left for 560x. But - even if the CPU usage is almost zero the CPU also gets to 75C. So in case of gaming I’m not sure there will be a lot of difference between 560 and 555, even small CPU usage will bring the system again to the thermal limit. But there will be visible difference between the two GPUs in benchmarks or pure OpenGL/metal use cases.
Click to expand...

I’m also planning to get this configuration (2.2 + 555x).

What’s your overall impression ?
 
I'm also in the same confused state and looking for other people's experiences if the base model good enough vs the mid model.
 
Adeel_ said:
I’m also planning to get this configuration (2.2 + 555x).

What’s your overall impression ?
Click to expand...

I like it a lot, lots of power when needed and great battery life. I always try to stay away from the top configurations of a given laptop chassis, I had a brain fart initially and ordered i9 + 560, luckilly was able to cancel before it got shipped it and got base +32GB and 2TB. It kind of reminds me of the good ol' i7 920, there was no reason to buy any higher clocked version of it, and I still have two of its evolutionary xeon versions in my cheese grater that after 8 years still bench like the new base iMac Pro. I'm actually thinking of retiring my Mac Pro and use this 2.2 MacBook instead, but I need to check how it performs with Vega FE in Core X enclosure. Although the old fart is still 50% faster and has 3x RAM.

People tend to forget that power requirements of a CPU/GPU don't scale linearly with its performance, its rather an exponential function, you pay much more with energy usage for increased performance, so the published base clocks mean nothing if you're thermally constrained. Intel sells the same silicon with different clock limits, but the same power/performance ratio, that even at base version full turbo require desktop class cooling, AMD plays catch up with Nvidia allowing its product to pull obscene amounts of power. And this is a thin laptop, I'm sure there are some scenarios where i9+560x would show some measurable advantage over base 2.2+555x, but no thank you, when pushed the 2.2+555x still exceeds the heat dissipation ability of the chassis, so I can only imagine how much louder and hotter the high end combo gets for a meager performance increase. I prefer comfort when working away from home, and the base 2.2+555x provides plenty of it.
 
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Guys, I have one more question. I need to stick to my budget which means i can get one of the below. Which one you suggest ?
1. Buy the base model (i7/16gb/555X GPU/256 SSD) + Apple care or
2. Buy the mid model Mid (i7/16gb/560X GPU/512 SSD) & no apple care.

I know Apple care is subjective. Let me know which options you would pick ?
 
No matter what, don't get the 256GB SSD, you will find it not sufficient after some time.
 
I am leaning toward the 512 GB system. Primarily because I think 256GB is too small for me, and once you subtract the disk upgrade cost, the $100 extra for a faster CPU and slightly better GPU seems like a bargain.

The images I play around with in PS/Lightroom are usually raw files and with camera sensors getting bigger and bigger (32MB+) the raws are getting bigger. Add to this the 2 or 3 versions of these files I create as part of my workflow and you run out of disk space pretty quickly. Then add a VM or two and no more space.
 
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DaveMike11 said:
1. Buy the base model (i7/16gb/555X GPU/256 SSD) + Apple care or
2. Buy the mid model Mid (i7/16gb/560X GPU/512 SSD) & no apple care.
Click to expand...

Get a custom 2.2/16/512/555x, 200 cheaper than stock 2.6. Put the 200 towards future purchase of apple care before the initial year runs out. The only difference will be a loss of about 15% on GPU power, even less if doing anything that taxes CPU at the same time. Don't skip on SSD, I find it ridiculous that apple sells the base 15 inch pro machine with the same storage amount as my phone. SSD/RAM upgrades are 'free' - you don't pay for it with additional heat/throttling.
 
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Thysanoptera said:
I like it a lot, lots of power when needed and great battery life. I always try to stay away from the top configurations of a given laptop chassis, I had a brain fart initially and ordered i9 + 560, luckilly was able to cancel before it got shipped it and got base +32GB and 2TB. It kind of reminds me of the good ol' i7 920, there was no reason to buy any higher clocked version of it, and I still have two of its evolutionary xeon versions in my cheese grater that after 8 years still bench like the new base iMac Pro. I'm actually thinking of retiring my Mac Pro and use this 2.2 MacBook instead, but I need to check how it performs with Vega FE in Core X enclosure. Although the old fart is still 50% faster and has 3x RAM.

People tend to forget that power requirements of a CPU/GPU don't scale linearly with its performance, its rather an exponential function, you pay much more with energy usage for increased performance, so the published base clocks mean nothing if you're thermally constrained. Intel sells the same silicon with different clock limits, but the same power/performance ratio, that even at base version full turbo require desktop class cooling, AMD plays catch up with Nvidia allowing its product to pull obscene amounts of power. And this is a thin laptop, I'm sure there are some scenarios where i9+560x would show some measurable advantage over base 2.2+555x, but no thank you, when pushed the 2.2+555x still exceeds the heat dissipation ability of the chassis, so I can only imagine how much louder and hotter the high end combo gets for a meager performance increase. I prefer comfort when working away from home, and the base 2.2+555x provides plenty of it.
Click to expand...

This is very helpful! Thank you! I'm trying to decide between a base 15" (with SSD upgrade to 512gb) and the 13" MBP. I'm a web developer so performance wise I don't need much except a decent amount of RAM. I want the extra screen space though otherwise I feel forced to work at my desk with external monitors.

How has the heat been for you doing basic stuff like web browsing, youtube etc. Because I need Chrome dev tools I would need to be on chrome most of the time rather than safari (not ideal I realize). My current 2015 15" MBP with integrated graphics can get really hot at random times (just browsing particularly javascript heavy sites). I had a Macbook Air previously that really spoiled me for quiet cool computing but I need as much screen space on the go as I can get. Is the 2018 base 15" at least usable on your lap from a heat perspective? Are the fans distracting in normal non-pro use?
 
Thysanoptera said:
Get a custom 2.2/16/512/555x, 200 cheaper than stock 2.6. Put the 200 towards future purchase of apple care before the initial year runs out. The only difference will be a loss of about 15% on GPU power, even less if doing anything that taxes CPU at the same time. Don't skip on SSD, I find it ridiculous that apple sells the base 15 inch pro machine with the same storage amount as my phone. SSD/RAM upgrades are 'free' - you don't pay for it with additional heat/throttling.
Click to expand...
I agree with this sentiment, but OP says he will be buying from Best Buy, so assumably they won't have BTO options in stock.

@DaveMike11 - Honestly speaking, I think the base model will suffice for your needs in terms of processing power and RAM. I'm not sure how much onboard storage you will require, but 256GB is not much these days and definitely not enough for me. That's why I personally will be getting the base model but upping the storage to 512GB minimum. Since BTO is not an option for you, I'd say go with the higher end model unless you know for sure you won't have issues constantly managing your limited storage space.
 
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Is that gap of performance between the 2.2 and the 2.6 larger than between the 2.6 and the 2.9?
 
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