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nice .. just picked up my 15in 2.3 quad mbp hires antiglare .. only hdd option they had in store was the 750gb 5400 rpm .. will eventually change it with an ssd then switch the drive into the ODD but for now im stuck with the 5400rpm drive

I think you'll find yourself more than happy with the 5400 for now. I've got the 2010 i7 17" model that I picked up last august. Stopped in to Best Buy today just to see if they had any in. Both Mac resellers in Anchorage weren't anticipating delivery til next week sometime. Don't know why I did. But I did. Bought the new 17" 2.2/750gig/4g RAM. Essentially the stock 17. Compared even to my 2010...the snappiness is very apparent. I bought my wife the 11" Air a month ago, so I'm totally sold on the SSDs now...and eventually I'll put one in this new MBP. For now though, I'm really happy with it's speed. Seems at least twice as quick opening programs and just general computer workflow. Again, compared to my 2.66 i7 with a 7200rpm drive.

I figured I could add drive and RAM...the gpu is the same...just can't do anything about the processor, so I'm curious the real world speed differential between the 2.2 and 2.3 models. Where the cache size is a 30% increase over the 2.2...seems to me it's easily worth the 250 difference, especially considering the price difference retail is 50 bucks.

Also, it seems to me that the Apple BTO prices are much better this time around. The 256 gig SSD is a similar price at OWC...and the RAM for convenience sake doesn't seem to be as overpriced as we've become accustomed to over the last several years...IMHO. If you have patience and aren't as impulsive as I....doing a custom configuration for the higher end models seems viable and reasonably priced. Of course, ymmv.

I'm in the middle if installing Logic with music beds and sfx (no jam packs) after a complete install of FCP, and several key apps I need....Handbrake, Perian, VLC, Dropbox, Aperture, Pixelmator...and the entire microsoft 2011 Office suite. Current temps as follows: HD 34. CPU 40, CPU Heatsink 34, enclosure base...25, 28, 29...GPU 35, and Heatsink B 34. These temps have been constant all nigh with a fluctuation of +\- 2-4 degrees. All setup and updates. Mo gaming yet. But I'll be ripping some music and messing with the 64 bit Handbrake tonight. Also, with FCP I'm excited to transcode some Canon 5d2 and 7d footage to ProRes. I'll be comparing notes with my 2008 MacPro dual quad core 3.0ghz with 14gigs of RAM....how do I do those geek bench tests and cinemark/bench or whatever? Do these have anything to do with real world usage?

Smokin' little machine. I'm excited about this beast. It's awesome:)

Jer
 
The 2.2GHz Quad-Core i7 has an L3 Cache of 6MB, whereas the 2.3GHz Quad-Core i7 has an L3 Cache of 8MB. The Cache is where the real difference lies, not the 100MHz between them.
Thanks for the clarification. I confess, though, that an additional $250 for a .1GHz faster chip and an extra 2MB of L3 cache still seems excessive, even for Apple.
 
I have a 3.2 ghz xeon in my 2009 MP and just ran geekbench in 32 bit mode and got 10104. So in the future I may just sell the MP and get myself the 15" MBP with the SB i7. I can't believe how fast processors have become!
 
Thanks for the clarification. I confess, though, that an additional $250 for a .1GHz faster chip and an extra 2MB of L3 cache still seems excessive, even for Apple.

If you look on Wikipedia, the 2820QM [2.3GHz] is $190 more expensive than the 2720QM [2.2Ghz]. I'm sure apple doesn't pay nearly as much for either of the processors, but the price increase isn't completely inane. I think it's a $225 increase with the education discount.
 
i downloaded cinebench osx and ran the tests. I dunno what they mean, but here is the pic of the results..
 

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here is the geekbench (32 bit, as the 64 bit you have to pay for..). Ran w/o the MBP plugged in, if that even makes a difference. This is on 4GB of RAM and the stock 750GB 5400 RPM drive.. after 8GB and a faster HDD, scores would go up I am sure.
 

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If you look on Wikipedia, the 2820QM [2.3GHz] is $190 more expensive than the 2720QM [2.2Ghz]. I'm sure apple doesn't pay nearly as much for either of the processors, but the price increase isn't completely inane. I think it's a $225 increase with the education discount.
Thanks. Based on this added information, the $250 price increment for the 2.3GHz chip upgrade no longer strikes me as especially unreasonable. By the way, Apple's price of $200 to upgrade the MBPs' RAM from 4GB to 8GB seems perfectly reasonable as OWC's price for 2 4GB modules is about $175.

In any event I got an MBA in March, which has mostly replaced my MBP, so I likely won't be in the market for a new MBP for quite awhile. The powerful new 17 inch MBP, though, looks good and I am sure it will only get better as a result of future updates.
 
Question to the OP:

How does Parallels/ Vmware perform, especially 3D, do they utilize the half of the AMD graphics card power (ie 512mb)?
 
83$ from NewEgg. It's still a ripoff ;) (OWC's price is 115$ BTW)
I thought I saw a higher price than that at the OWC site but since I wasn't really in the market, I didn't look very carefully. Your NewEgg and OWC links served to reinforce my long held policy of never buying bigger or faster hard drives, or more memory, from Apple if they are available from a third party vendor. I am willing to pay the Apple Tax when necessary but will gladly avoid it if I can.
 
I went with SSD so hopefully I get some noise reduction there. Would be a little bit of a buzz kill for me if there was no noise reduction on the fans :(

K, i lied, it is louder I think. I can tell where the fan noise is coming from, i THINK it might be the hdd... but i'm not sure. is the 750 gb hdd louder than the 500 gb hdd?? anybody?
 
I think you'll find yourself more than happy with the 5400 for now. I've got the 2010 i7 17" model that I picked up last august. Stopped in to Best Buy today just to see if they had any in. Both Mac resellers in Anchorage weren't anticipating delivery til next week sometime. Don't know why I did. But I did. Bought the new 17" 2.2/750gig/4g RAM. Essentially the stock 17. Compared even to my 2010...the snappiness is very apparent. I bought my wife the 11" Air a month ago, so I'm totally sold on the SSDs now...and eventually I'll put one in this new MBP. For now though, I'm really happy with it's speed. Seems at least twice as quick opening programs and just general computer workflow. Again, compared to my 2.66 i7 with a 7200rpm drive.

I figured I could add drive and RAM...the gpu is the same...just can't do anything about the processor, so I'm curious the real world speed differential between the 2.2 and 2.3 models. Where the cache size is a 30% increase over the 2.2...seems to me it's easily worth the 250 difference, especially considering the price difference retail is 50 bucks.

Also, it seems to me that the Apple BTO prices are much better this time around. The 256 gig SSD is a similar price at OWC...and the RAM for convenience sake doesn't seem to be as overpriced as we've become accustomed to over the last several years...IMHO. If you have patience and aren't as impulsive as I....doing a custom configuration for the higher end models seems viable and reasonably priced. Of course, ymmv.

I'm in the middle if installing Logic with music beds and sfx (no jam packs) after a complete install of FCP, and several key apps I need....Handbrake, Perian, VLC, Dropbox, Aperture, Pixelmator...and the entire microsoft 2011 Office suite. Current temps as follows: HD 34. CPU 40, CPU Heatsink 34, enclosure base...25, 28, 29...GPU 35, and Heatsink B 34. These temps have been constant all nigh with a fluctuation of +\- 2-4 degrees. All setup and updates. Mo gaming yet. But I'll be ripping some music and messing with the 64 bit Handbrake tonight. Also, with FCP I'm excited to transcode some Canon 5d2 and 7d footage to ProRes. I'll be comparing notes with my 2008 MacPro dual quad core 3.0ghz with 14gigs of RAM....how do I do those geek bench tests and cinemark/bench or whatever? Do these have anything to do with real world usage?

Smokin' little machine. I'm excited about this beast. It's awesome:)

Jer

Yea it definitely does seem snappy even with the 5400rpm drive. I ordered an 8gb kit for this little beast. This is going to be my main machine for awhile as I am selling my i7 imac. I cant wait to use this to work on footage rom my 7D ( no 5DMII unfortunately). Gonna use it to edit a quick short on Avid then im moving on to FCS.
 
Synthetic benchmark. :rolleyes:

The machine is NOT faster than a Mac Pro. Both machines have processors based on the Nehalem architecture and hence perform pretty equal clock per clock. Given that 2.8GHz is considerably higher than 2.3GHz, the Mac Pro is undoubtedly faster.


You are wrong. New MBP's CPU is Sandy Bridge -
it is based on Sandy Bridge architecture, not Nehalem.

There is nothing surprising that new MBP is faster than old Mac Pro. :apple:
New architecture brought a quite strong performance advance.
 
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