Is the new MBP the right laptop for NON graphics designers like me?

[macbook123]

So I do think the new MBP's are impressive, but am not sure getting one myself would be throwing pearls to the swine. I'm a scientist and use it mostly for heavy computations using C and fortran, making talks with keynote, email, a lot of document reading, browsing, and for my personal photo album, and occasional movie watching. The real advantage having a Mac over another laptop is that the OSX is Unix based yet more dummy friendly than Linux.

But it seems that I will never be using the 9600 graphics card. Also, I'm not sure if the increased L2 cache is useful for my kinds of applications.

My questions are:

1) does the faster graphics card help with every day tasks, i.e. will it be employed at all in applications other than video editing?

2) What kinds of applications benefit from better L2 cache?

Thanks.

 

[NT1440]

from what i can tell the new macbook would be great for you, as well as also saving a chunck of change. I'd wait for opinions from others first tho.

 

[jhamerphoto]

Once Snow Leopard is released, it will better harness the GPU for non-graphics processes, which is exactly what you want, and it will work with the new MBPs.

I would say you can't really go wrong with a new MBP, unless you really can't part with that much money.

 

[mobilehaathi]

A larger cache will help sustained scientific computations (as long as they're written well). Accessing the cache is a couple orders of magnitude faster than accessing the RAM. If you're not playing games or writing parallel code to use the multiple cores of your GPU, the discrete video card won't do much for you.

 

[Logos327]

Once Snow Leopard is released, it will better harness the GPU for non-graphics processes, which is exactly what you want, and it will work with the new MBPs.

I would say you can't really go wrong with a new MBP, unless you really can't part with that much money.

Exactly

If the money is not a big deal definitely go with the MBP.

 

[macbook123]

Exactly

If the money is not a big deal definitely go with the MBP.

No, it's not, that's what a research grant is for

I guess I was just thinking about moving back to a Sony/Dell with Linux. But it's hard imagining life without the convenience of OSX. And the great built of a MBP of course.

Thanks for the notes from everybody!

 

[Logos327]

No, it's not, that's what a research grant is for

I guess I was just thinking about moving back to a Sony/Dell with Linux. But it's hard imagining life without the convenience of OSX. And the great built of a MBP of course.

Thanks for the notes from everybody!

Great. I am a big proponent of spending as much money on a new computer as possible for you (meaning buying as many upgrades as you can). This makes your computer last that much longer (not like apple computers need help in that department though).

Don't go back to Linux. Don't get me wrong, I love playing around with Ubuntu and enjoy it more than Windows (much more actually). That is a major reason why I am buy a mac. I want a unix machine that just works. Apple offers that.