How much more power would I get in a Mac Pro compared to a MBP?

[naid]

Thought I'd chime in since I recently switched from current-gen MBP 2.53 to a MP Quad 2.66 Nehalem. The difference is significant, even for daily tasks. I like to have a lot of stuff open (a dozen browsers, email/chat clients, terminals, iTunes, Parallels and what not). The MP feels snappy and the fans are humming at 856 RPM, barely noticeable. The MBP was feeling more sluggish (slower drive, 4GB RAM vs 8GB in the MP) and the fans would spin up to 6200 RPM making the machine really loud.

Also, you could get an Intel X25-M SSD for your MP and the disk performance will skyrocket. Regardless of the drive configuration (RAID or not), always have a backup. RAID redundancy is not sufficient, as a controller failure could corrupt your data on all drives. Time Machine to a separate drive, either internal or external, will be just fine.

 

[gugucom]

So I suppose if you wanted faster overall performance and value the level expansion a desktop can give you, the choice would be simple. And configured with relatively quiet hard drives, Mac Pros are close to dead silent, unless you have a noisy video card installed (like the Radeon 3870).

The 3870 can be run with an Akasa Vortexx Neo cooler which trades at 19$ and would be inaudible in most cases. So that isn't really a point against it.

I would also recommend the Mac Pro because it allows you to run cheap BD ROMs under Vista or XP with conventional SATA ports. I don't know if your game machine does that.