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Askingcow

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 21, 2016
3
1
Hey Guys,

I'll be buying an updated MBP 15 whenever it's refreshed. I'm coming from an older 13 inch and the extra oomph for my Xcode projects would be nice. The catch is I already am not going to love the weight gain, and the heat gain on the 15. I have a pretty beefy Windows machine for gaming, so I am wondering how much of a difference in battery/heat I would notice if I chose a MBP 15 without the dGPU. I'd still be upping the CPU from base to a higher model in either case. Also, I will be getting an external display at some point around the same time and if I go without a dGPU, I'd like to make sure I could still drive the display.

Thanks!
 
Hey Guys,

I'll be buying an updated MBP 15 whenever it's refreshed. I'm coming from an older 13 inch and the extra oomph for my Xcode projects would be nice. The catch is I already am not going to love the weight gain, and the heat gain on the 15. I have a pretty beefy Windows machine for gaming, so I am wondering how much of a difference in battery/heat I would notice if I chose a MBP 15 without the dGPU. I'd still be upping the CPU from base to a higher model in either case. Also, I will be getting an external display at some point around the same time and if I go without a dGPU, I'd like to make sure I could still drive the display.

Thanks!

Well battery life will go up with skylake, heat will go down as well, the difference between dGPU and iGPU should not be too great and more importantly if you don't need the dGPU, why bother, it's just another part to go wrong. All rMBP's have been able to drive a 4K screen since 2013 so I can't seeing an external screen being an issue hell the next update should be able to drive a 5k screen at 60hz over one cable, the current 15 inch requires two cables to pull that feat off.
 
Hey Guys,

I'll be buying an updated MBP 15 whenever it's refreshed. I'm coming from an older 13 inch and the extra oomph for my Xcode projects would be nice. The catch is I already am not going to love the weight gain, and the heat gain on the 15. I have a pretty beefy Windows machine for gaming, so I am wondering how much of a difference in battery/heat I would notice if I chose a MBP 15 without the dGPU. I'd still be upping the CPU from base to a higher model in either case. Also, I will be getting an external display at some point around the same time and if I go without a dGPU, I'd like to make sure I could still drive the display.

Thanks!
Unless your work is extremely time critical and every single second counts, upgrading the processor will likely yield next to no noticeable performance gain in real world applications, I'd skip upgrades entirely in your case.
 
so I am wondering how much of a difference in battery/heat I would notice if I chose a MBP 15 without the dGPU.
Skylake will run cooler then the current generation and it will have better battery life, with that said, it should be fairly noticeable in terms of battery life when it comes to the dGPU. I'm not sure about the heat however.
 
I have the 2015 15inch without the dGPU and it does perfectly fine for me. I run a windows VM and utilize AutoCAD to create and edit numerous Civil drawings. The Macbook Pro stays quiet and has no issue. The only time the fans kick in hard is when I am playing League of Legends on my 1080p monitor on max settings but that is expected. I can run my 4k TV without a sweat and I am looking to invest in a 4k monitor shortly.

The weight is no different between one with a dGPU and one without. Battery life shouldn't be different either unless you do GPU intensive tasks which would kick the dGPU on. For about 80% of the things the dGPU will remain off and the iGPU will be doing the work.
 
Would you buy an Xbox without a graphics card?

I'm not sure I see it as a good comparison. If I don't need the extra GPU but the computing process and CPU speed are the same other wise, but I can a cooler machine with better battery life, isn't that an fair trade for my own personal needs?
 
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