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4gig memory or 320gb@7200??

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Dipdip

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 11, 2008
68
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I'm planning to buy a MBP in January. In your opinion, which one would be a better choice, 4gig memory or 320gb@7200??

Also, people have been talking about a Rev. B. If this happens, will it be released around early Jan? Thank you kindly.
 
I'd chose the 4 gig's of memory, because a 7200 drive will just eat your battery that much faster. A 5400 drive is fine...
 
Kleivonen said:
I'd chose the 4 gig's of memory, because a 7200 drive will just eat your battery that much faster. A 5400 drive is fine...
Click to expand...

not necessarily true. a faster drive will get the read/write done much faster so the disk spins for less the time. battery life turns out to be roughly the same.

it's really up to you really, whether more memory or faster HDD. but I'd say that if you are not using any memory intensive programs then go for the faster HDD. Personally I went for both (2.53ghz model default to 4gb anyway).
 
The battery of a 7200 vs 5400 is pretty minimal because you aren't constantly hitting the drive; however, in real life you will notice the improvements on boot time, apps launching, etc.
 
Depends what your MBP has to say about it.

When you get the pro, and start doing what you'll be doing with it, open up activity monitor. If it states you have no free ram left out of the 2 gigs, or shows that you have page outs, I'd then start with the ram.

Oh, and if you'll be using parallels, you may as well get 4 gigs. It just LOVES the ram...

As for earlier comments about 7200 hard drives, check out some reviews at tom'shardware.com. The new 7200's didn't use that much more energy than many of the 5400's.
 
Dipdip said:
In your opinion, which one would be a better choice, 4gig memory or 320gb@7200??
Click to expand...

Which one will benefit you more depends on what type of use your MBP will typically see. The drive would be most beneficial when working with very large files or doing a lot of disk-intensive work, but lower RAM could necessitate more frequent paging out to virtual memory, which would increase disk usage, creating a bottleneck and decreasing battery life.

The "average" user would probably benefit more from the RAM.

Keep in mind that either component can easily be upgraded (on the new models) by the user at any future time.
 
Ram is my pick. You will see a bigger gain from ram. I just put a Seagate 320GB 7200RPM drive in to my MBP and was not that impressed by the gain I got. HD drives are cheap and easy to switch.:) I am waiting for a cheap SSD.;)
 
Just get the 4GB and the 250 at 7200. If you can't afford that, save up the extra money. You're already spending so much on our machine, it won't hurt to give it a little more 'oomph'
 
I'm going to get the 4gigs of RAM and upgrade the HD later on. Thanks for all the replies guys!
 
Well I have not seen that much difference in performance in the things that I do between 2 and 4 Gigs of memory - this on 2.4GHz MBPs pre Unibody. So I opted for the 2.4GHz MBP Unibody in stock form from an "authorized reseller" with $150 rebate. Then upgraded to a 500GB hard disk to hold music, video, photos and a large XP BootCamp partition.

I run also run VMware using XP Bootcamp, and two distributions of LINUX as virtual machines.

I have a an external terabyte hard drive for backups.

Neil
 
Dipdip said:
I'm planning to buy a MBP in January. In your opinion, which one would be a better choice, 4gig memory or 320gb@7200??

Also, people have been talking about a Rev. B. If this happens, will it be released around early Jan? Thank you kindly.
Click to expand...

4 Gig memory.
 
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