Macbook pro Base model or Midrange...Ordering now help me choose.

[Dan0903]

Is the midrange worth the extra £270 (im using a student discount).


Im ordering in the next 30 mins, i just wanted some help deciding.


Thanks.

 

[boonleng]

I say go for the midrange. Who wants a Penryn with just 3MB L2 Cache? Go for the mid range, it's got 6MB L2 Cache, bigger hard drive and 512MB VRAM! It's worth it.

 

[novocaine]

Definitely Midrange.
6Mb L2, 512 Vram, and bigger HD. absolutely a better deal.

 

[chrmjenkins]

Unless you do heavy gaming (like Crysis) or intensive 3d video editing, you don't need the midrange. Get the lower one and use the extra to buy 4gb of ram and applecare. (and the 7200 hard drive).

 

[boonleng]

Forgot to mention that nvidia is launching CUDA. So GPU takes some load for processing... More VRAM will help CUDA.

 

[TEG]

Yes, the midrange is worth its extra cost, because it will be relevant much longer.

TEG

 

[pianoplayer1]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A93 Safari/419.3)

I got the 2.4 with 7200 drive and I'm getting 4 gigs of ram.

The 2.5 will make slight boosts in speed but the graphics card really won't benefit. The hd doesn't matter because u should get the 7200.

So for me a small speed boost wasn't worth another 500 more than the 2.4, in total $1000 more than the blackbook.

 

[chrmjenkins]

The performance difference between the two will be about 5% in normal use. Is 5% worth 500 USD? I don't think so.

 

[sadilak]

Go for the lower end one and when it matters the most, upgrade the ram. HDD is not really a big deal.

 

[Beric]

The only reason I would upgrade is if you want a better graphics card. If that isn't important to you don't upgrade.

Of course, if you got money burning in your pocket, why not upgrade?

 

[novocaine]

It also depend on how long you are planning to keep this machine. When I bought my Powerbook 3.5 years ago, I thought I wouldn't need the extra CPU and GPU power so I went with the base model. It turned out that I really didn't care much about the CPU, but I definitely regret not choosing the better GPU (more Vram). I don't do gaming and I don't do much video or 3D editing, but I do edit photos, and I think most of us would need to edit photos to certain extent. So if you are going to keep this baby for a long time, go with the midrange, it will definitely keep you happy longer.

 

[Dan0903]

The macbook pro is a Uni present from my parents, originally an xmas present, i put it off when i heard about the possible update.

I'm going to study Animation at university, i like playing games (would like to play crysis) and from time to time i make films using motion and final cut.

So a lot of people think i should got for the midrange then?

i'm getting this RAM to stick in it when it comes, will it work fine?

http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/34970...667/2G+2GB+DDR2+SODIMM+Upgrade&searchsource=0

Can anyone recommend a good case from the apple website?

 

[Dan0903]

*bump*

And whats the difference between the 5400 and the 7200rpm disk drives?

 

[Dan0903]

someone?

 

[Dan0903]

anyone?

 

[pionata]

anyone?

7200 is much faster, this is useful specially for musicians that need a very fast access to the harddrive when using samples or doing studio recording. Of course it helps for loading time in games and caching also.