Base 15 vs the other 15 and some other questions.

[InuNacho]

So at the moment I'm torn between which 15 incher I should get, the base or the higher end model. I'd love to get that nice 17 with the Expresscard but unfortunately it's way out of my budget.

Anyhow this purchase isn't for right now, it's for whenever the new models come out. I'm sorta hoping that the redesign will mean a drastic drop in price for these "older" models, so yea.

Ok onto the questions.

First off I've looked around these forums and a few places online and they all say that the performance differences between the 6750 and the 6770 isn't that big. Is there one between the 6750's 512 and the 6770's 1GB?
I plan on doing quite a bit of FCP7 (mainly SD and gradually moving towards more HD) and using a U2410 in extended desktop, will I have any issues?
I don't play any games currently on my Macbook except for Unreal 2004 so I don't see the point in shelling out extra cash on something I won't really use.

EDIT: Speaking of Unreal how does the HD 3000 and 6750 work? Does the 6750 turn on automatically or when being charged or what?

The drive it comes with doesn't matter since it'll be swapped out for a hybrid one the second I get it and the same goes for the ODD. I will still use the ODD on a regular basis so should I get an enclosure for it that uses FW800 or will USB be good enough?

How fast is the SDXC card slot when connected to a XC card? Assuming the current 64GB cards drop in price over the next half year would it be reasonable to store my iTunes library on there to save some space on the main internal?

How exactly does Thunderbolt work with non-Thunderbolt displays? Can I just plug in a Mini Display cable and call it a day? Are there any external drives or adapters that offer anything faster then FW800 that I could link to a non-Thunderbolt display on the market right now?

On a fresh new battery how long will it last if I'm working on something in FC with the brightness maxed?

I know it's quite a bit but I appreciate all input.

 

[thundersteele]

OSX determines automatically whether it should use the integrated or the discrete GPU.

The difference between the 6750 and 6770 is very small. How big the benefit from the video ram is I don't know.

SDXC should be fast enough for music. You also have to buy a fast card however!

The thunderbolt port works like the previous mini display port, so you can use the same adapter. A few thunderbolt external drives are available, see e.g. on the apple store. They usually have two ports so you can plug the external HD into the MBP and then plug the screen into the external HD. That procedure is called daisy chaining.

 

[dmccloud]

Based on what applications you will be using, you should be fine with the base model 15" MBP. UT 2004 is old enough that the integrated graphic should be able to use it without any trouble. WoW is fully playable on that chipset, and there's more going on there than there is in Unreal.

As far as SDXC goes, while I haven't had a chance to actually test out a SDXC card, it's important to note that the card reader in the MBP is backwards-compatible with both standard SD and SDHC. What you want to look for is the "class" of the card. The higher the class, the faster the transfer speeds. I've seen SDHC cards in the 30-40 MBps range, and that's where you'll see the top speeds for SDXC as well. The difference between SDHC and SDXC isn't in speeds, but in max capacity. SDHC uses FAT32 filesystem and maxes out at 32GB, while SDXC uses exFAT and has a theoretical max of 2TB.