Buy earlier version for NVIDIA card?

[zenofchaos]

I am going to be buying a Macbook Pro for editing video with Adobe Premiere Pro. I am planning to buy a refurbished unit and I was wondering if it would make sense for me to buy an April 2010 model that has an NVIDIA card in order to take advantage of the CUDA technology with Premiere Pro, or would the newer quad-core chip performance exceed any benefit gained from the NVIDIA card?

Thanks.

Beverly

 

[simsaladimbamba]

The 330M or 9600M from the 2010 and 2009 MBPs are not listed by Adobe as being usable via CUDA.
http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/tech-specs.html

A current MBP will do okay, if you want to use highly compressed HD footage. If you transcode the footage to a proper editing format using a proper editing codec, you will do more than fine. I can even edit HD (1080p from 5D MK II) on my 2007 iMac, when the footage is properly transcoded.

 

[zenofchaos]

Thanks for the reply. According to NVIDIA's site, the 330M does have the CUDA technology, but perhaps not when used with the MBP hardware?

I am leaning toward a new model in order to have the fasted processor, so if the CUDA is not an issue, my decision will be to go newer.

Edited to add: The issue may be that Adobe does not certify that the 330M is CUDA compatible with Adobe CS5. I thought that if the chip has CUDA it should work with CS5, but perhaps not.

 

[Heavertron]

Edited to add: The issue may be that Adobe does not certify that the 330M is CUDA compatible with Adobe CS5. I thought that if the chip has CUDA it should work with CS5, but perhaps not.

EDIT: I stand corrected.

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

CUDA on 330M is not enabled/supported in OS X

Wrong!

http://www.nvidia.com/object/macosx-cuda-4.0.17-driver.html

;-)

 

[Erasmus]

Trading a quad core CPU for an old, slow NVIDIA GPU sounds like a bad deal to me. It seems likely to me that the new quad core CPUs could probably keep up with a 330M.

Perhaps you should consider other options, especially if you only need to do serious rendering every now and then at a desk, and can just do preparation and quick previews when you're mobile.

For example, either a cheap Windows PC, or putting a decent desktop NVIDIA GPU in an external thunderbolt enclosure for your new MBP.

Or, if it's not critical that you get a new MBP now, you could wait and see if the Ivy Bridge MBPs will come with NVIDIA GPUs.