Help deciding, student looking into a MBP

[DuFFy]

Hey everyone. So I am a college student in the media art/design field. I've been drooling over macs for about a year now, having never owned one mostly because I've grown up using cheap 600 dollar dells my whole life. So now I have a situation where i can afford a mac but I want one that will do what i need it to do. I'm almost sure I want a macbook pro (15") but I did alittle searching about the Nvidia Geforce 9600M GT and haven't found anything clear about what it can handle. I use photoshop, flash and illustrator a lot but im not worried about them. My concern is running Autodesk's Maya. I'll be doing a fairly large amount of work in it for classes over the next 3 years. My current laptop handles it okay but only with the most simple models, once it gets complicated it goes screwy (its a dell latitude D630, btw). I'm confident a MBP would run better than that but I dont know how much better and how complex a project can go before Maya wont run right. So can anyone give me advice, cuz im really unsure about what do to. I'd love to have the portability of the laptop but if anyone knows for sure that a MBP wouldnt handle it, then I'd consider getting an iMac if it would be better, thats a last resort tho.

Thanks

 

[spunklemonkey]

Youd be better off with a second hand imac if youre going to do complex modelling or a pc. You can get imac memory up to 3gb (ive got 4gb in mine to use dual channel, but it only uses 3gb mines an older core 2 duo).

The bigger problem in my eyes (im a flash designer but ive done modelling a lot for various projects) is the screen size, 15" resolutions are very small so its going to slow you down a bit compared to bigger screens.

If you really want a mbp you will have to put up with the smaller screen and it might slow down on complex things, but then again the quality of the modelling has an effect too

 

[DuFFy]

i do agree that it will be annoying to work on a smaller screen. However I just need it to handle modelling when im working away from campus. We have labs here with dual monitor setups that ill do a lot of the work on. I just want to be able to model at home if I want (because I commute) but also have a computer I can take with me if I have to. Thanks though, do you think the new MBPs are good enough to handle?

 

[winninganthem]

Pfft, MBP's are more than enough to handle Maya and basically every kind of pro app available.

As a college student, I think you should get the MBP for portability's sake. It has enough power to run whatever design/3d app you can throw at it. If you're worried about display size, you can always hook it up to an external monitor later on.

You might want to research a bit about Maya for Mac, since this guy says that the Mac version is buggy.

 

[Eddyisgreat]

Since you'll be working in Maya and you can now afford one why not go for the best?

Get a 17" MBP whose 9600M GT sports 512 megs of vram and a higher default clock than that of the 15"-hi (as evident from the previous first gen of MBPs) and will allow you to drive a 30" display with plenty of textures.

If you are really serious and all your licenses are for Winblows you can go to vista/xp via bootcamp and overclock your 9600M GT to spec since Apple underclocks mobile GPUs for battery and heat sake.