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MacBook Pro performance?

G

gangst

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 27, 2004
614
0
UK
Hi,

I'm a student and looking to get a new laptop which will alst em a while so i think I will opt for a Mac Pro. My current Mac is a quad 2.5ghz G5 Powermac with 4GB RAM, and i love the performance as it always feels so sharp and can encode videos really quickly.

My friend has a macbook which i regularly use, i think it is about a year and half old and its feels slow and clunky when using it. Word is a pain in the backside, however that is probably due to it not being the universal binary. Anyway things like tabs in web browsers are slow and it is annoying.

If i buy a 15inch Macbook pro upgrade the processor to the 2.6ghx option and possibly the ram to 4gb, depending on cost. Will it be as fast as my PowerMac? I cannot stand slow computers and regularly run software which requires good amounts of processing power. Also, off topic, if i install windows, are the drivers good enough to run games?

Thanks for any help.
 
gangst said:
really, thats what i was hoping, my powermac is getting on to three years old now anyway.
Click to expand...

It should be just as fast for a lot things, not to say all.

And all you need is the 2.5GHz, but of course if you are looking for the fastest, I guess it doesn't hurt to get the the 2.6GHz
 
gangst said:
Hi,

I'm a student and looking to get a new laptop which will alst em a while so i think I will opt for a Mac Pro. My current Mac is a quad 2.5ghz G5 Powermac with 4GB RAM, and i love the performance as it always feels so sharp and can encode videos really quickly.

My friend has a macbook which i regularly use, i think it is about a year and half old and its feels slow and clunky when using it. Word is a pain in the backside, however that is probably due to it not being the universal binary. Anyway things like tabs in web browsers are slow and it is annoying.
Click to expand...
Office 2004 is a bit of a pain on both Intel and PPC machines. I've heard Office 2008 is a bit faster, but that is just from reading a few reviews. Also heard '08 is somewhat of a pain in terms of its abilities. At the moment, I'm just sticking to Office 2004 for compatibility and using iWorks 08 for everything else.
gangst said:
If i buy a 15inch Macbook pro upgrade the processor to the 2.6ghx option and possibly the ram to 4gb, depending on cost. Will it be as fast as my PowerMac? I cannot stand slow computers and regularly run software which requires good amounts of processing power. Also, off topic, if i install windows, are the drivers good enough to run games?

Thanks for any help.
Click to expand...
It should be faster. If not, it will be when Snow Leopard comes out. And yes, I believe that all the drivers are good enough to run games as long as you have the proper hardware. Don't expect a MacBook to run games very well. The MBP, on the other hand, should run most modern games pretty well.
 
ok, thanks for the replies guys. i think I will go ahead and get a Macbook pro soonish. The buyers guide has them as mid-cycle and I dont start uni until October so i think I will hold out, possible upgrades? Where do the current chips stand in with Intels roadmap are they soon to be replaced?

Thanks for all your replies
 
gangst said:
ok, thanks for the replies guys. i think I will go ahead and get a Macbook pro soonish. The buyers guide has them as mid-cycle and I dont start uni until October so i think I will hold out, possible upgrades? Where do the current chips stand in with Intels roadmap are they soon to be replaced?

Thanks for all your replies
Click to expand...

Montevina will be out sometime in july, expect update sometime after that.
 
Take the 2.4 MBP or wait for the upgrade.
There has never been less use to upgrade to higher model than at the current generation. You wont feel more speed by 100mhz and neither by 256mb more vram as the gpu is to slow to feed it...


edit: the new MBP will come on 9th of october...
 
I cannot help you with G5 performance, since I never had one. I recently swapped my 2.4GHz C2D iMac for a 2.4GHz C2D Macbook Pro and they are pretty close in performance, especially once I upped the MBP from 2GB to 4GB.
 
Kaupa said:
Take the 2.4 MBP or wait for the upgrade.
There has never been less use to upgrade to higher model than at the current generation. You wont feel more speed by 100mhz and neither by 256mb more vram as the gpu is to slow to feed it...


edit: the new MBP will come on 9th of october...
Click to expand...

Well, the difference between the 2.4 and the 2.5 is more than just the CPU speed or the VRAM.... there's also double the L2 cache (3MB on the 2.4, 6MB on the 2.5). Depending on what applications you're running, the difference could be anywhere from 0% to more than 11% improvement in performance:

http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3246&p=12

Whether or not you would see a noticeable difference depends on how you use it. Whether or not it justifies the $500 difference is something only you can decide.

By the way, I'd love to see a link to the announcement from Apple (not personal opinions, "gut feelings", fortune-teller predictions, etc.) that the new MBP is coming out on the 9th of October!!!
 
Another recommendation for the faster hard drive--for many users, this would be a greater improvement than even the RAM upgrade.
 
amusiccale said:
Another recommendation for the faster hard drive--for many users, this would be a greater improvement than even the RAM upgrade.
Click to expand...

hmm i did consider this and am tempted. however, the extra 50gb seems more tempting when you want to be totally 'mobile' and its cheaper too :D

maybe they will upgrade the size of the faster hdd's?
 
The biggest 7200rpm laptop drive on the market is 320GB. It was recently announced by a few different manufacturers, but I have yet to see any for sale...

There is also a 500GB 5400rpm drive, but the currently shipping version won't fit in the 15" Macbook Pro.
 
ggjstudios said:
By the way, I'd love to see a link to the announcement from Apple (not personal opinions, "gut feelings", fortune-teller predictions, etc.) that the new MBP is coming out on the 9th of October!!!
Click to expand...

You'll have to wait until the 9th of October for that announcement from Apple, themselves. :D
 
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