i5 vs. i7: What is the difference and how are they similar?

[orfeas0]

In all honesty, I believe the extra video ram is only of significant need if your planning on running an additional monitor. Although with that being said, I run a 23" Monitor at 1080p, playing the occasional game : Cod, Age of Empires. And it runs it fine at medium settings for cod and high settings for AOE. Im not all that convinced that the extra RAM is of utter importance.

hello can i ask you something, a little off-topic?
Are you playing those games / any games on boot camp or mac OSX? Because when I tried to play games on my boot camp (macbook pro c2d 2,4ghz, 2gb ram, nvidia 9600gt), at first it worked kinda well, with very few shutdowns. But at some point it would always overheat when I tried to play a game so I only had like 30-60 minutes of gaming, then boom, macbook shut down. I guessed it was because of the overheat. The thing is that lower-end macbooks don't overheat in boot camp thanks to the shared GPU which keeps cool, thus making the high-end models less of gaming machines compared to the 13".

 

[Blu101]

tnx for your fast reply on that James.

i understand your point about the CPU, but what about the GPU difference? Isn't the 200USD difference worth both upgrades - i5 to i7 - and - 256mb to 512gb GPU?

http://www.barefeats.com/mbpp22.html

"...Turns out that you have to go all the way to 2560x1600 resolution (using an external 30" Cinema display) and 4X Anti-Aliasing to bring the "VRAM challenged" MacBook Pro to its knees.

Other graphics intensive apps we tried included Motion 4, OpenGL Extensions Viewer, and SmallLuxGPU OpenCL Benchmark. None of them indicated an advantage for the 512MB VRAM over the 256MB VRAM."

 

[s1lv3r]

http://www.barefeats.com/mbpp22.html

"...Turns out that you have to go all the way to 2560x1600 resolution (using an external 30" Cinema display) and 4X Anti-Aliasing to bring the "VRAM challenged" MacBook Pro to its knees.

Other graphics intensive apps we tried included Motion 4, OpenGL Extensions Viewer, and SmallLuxGPU OpenCL Benchmark. None of them indicated an advantage for the 512MB VRAM over the 256MB VRAM."

Great link Blu101

So.. now i'm almost sure i'm going with the i5.. but probably will get the 2.53 one..