MBP baseline 15' or midlevel?

[thegosh]

Hi all-
Long time reader, first time poster. I have been waiting for awhile to make the jump from a MB to a MBP, but had a question regarding the importance of L2 cache.

I noticed the baseline model only has 3 MB L2 cache, whereas the mid-level has 6 MB. Where/when (if ever) would I notice this difference? Does L2 cache really make that big of a difference?

I will mostly use the MBP to edit photos in Aperture, surf the net quite heavily, and use the Microsoft suite.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
thegosh

 

[BillG07]

Is the difference worth it?

Same question here, I'm finding it hard to justify $500 for a 0.1 GHz bump and more graphics memory. I've heard that 512MB of RAM is excessive on the 8600M anyway, as the card will be taxed well before the RAM is fully used. Any comments on this or why people chose the 2.5 vs the 2.4?

 

[pionata]

I just got the base model with 4 gigs of ram. I think that will do just fine as my main focus is audio and not games.

 

[methodmano]

You would likely see the difference in computation intensive tasks such as Photoshop (lots of algorithms), gaming (tons of calculations), etc. Day to day activities won't show a huge boost in performance.