MBP vs. nMP - Time to Upgrade?

[Michael73]

I've had a nMP for over a year and compared to my MBP 8,2 the performance is staggering (see my sig for rig details of both). While I work daily on my nMP, I rely on my MBP as a carbon copy more or less when I'm not at my desk. For the most part this means running MS Office, Adobe CS6 and Win7 with VMware Fusion (along with Mail, Safari, Calendar, etc.).

So the laptop is now 4 years old and last weekend I was traveling in Phoenix and was reminded how painfully slow the machine is. It's a stock config and I know I can eek some speed out of it by adding an SSD but is it worth it spending that on a rig that old? What kind of real world increases would I see by buying a new machine? I'm not in a huge hurry, I can wait till later this year if SkyLake will offer significantly better performance.

I know there's no way I'm going to get the same performance from a MBP that I do from my nMP but how close can I get?

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Depends...

I've had a nMP for over a year and compared to my MBP 8,2 the performance is staggering (see my sig for rig details of both). While I work daily on my nMP, I rely on my MBP as a carbon copy more or less when I'm not at my desk. For the most part this means running MS Office, Adobe CS6 and Win7 with VMware Fusion (along with Mail, Safari, Calendar, etc.).

So the laptop is now 4 years old and last weekend I was traveling in Phoenix and was reminded how painfully slow the machine is. It's a stock config and I know I can eek some speed out of it by adding an SSD but is it worth it spending that on a rig that old? What kind of real world increases would I see by buying a new machine? I'm not in a huge hurry, I can wait till later this year if SkyLake will offer significantly better performance.

I know there's no way I'm going to get the same performance from a MBP that I do from my nMP but how close can I get?

It depends on wether you are CPU bound by your workload or GPU bound. If CPU bound a new rMBP will give you about 2 thirds the processing power depending on what software you are using and how it uses multiple cores and hyperthreading.

If it is GPU bound then the nMP will cream it with the dual D500's (if the software can utilise them).

An SSd upgrade will be great in your MBP with any CPU bound processes and should not be much different in your machine compared to the rMBP. The newer graphics in the rMBP will smoke the old one though.

 

[yjchua95]

I've had a nMP for over a year and compared to my MBP 8,2 the performance is staggering (see my sig for rig details of both). While I work daily on my nMP, I rely on my MBP as a carbon copy more or less when I'm not at my desk. For the most part this means running MS Office, Adobe CS6 and Win7 with VMware Fusion (along with Mail, Safari, Calendar, etc.).

So the laptop is now 4 years old and last weekend I was traveling in Phoenix and was reminded how painfully slow the machine is. It's a stock config and I know I can eek some speed out of it by adding an SSD but is it worth it spending that on a rig that old? What kind of real world increases would I see by buying a new machine? I'm not in a huge hurry, I can wait till later this year if SkyLake will offer significantly better performance.

I know there's no way I'm going to get the same performance from a MBP that I do from my nMP but how close can I get?

It's not worth getting an SSD for it considering that it's one of those that are affected by Radeongate.

I've got two nMPs (both identically specced with 12-core E5-2697 v2s, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD and 12GB D700s), and those are used for heavy 4K cinematography. My 15" rMBP (late-2013 2.6/16/1TB/750M) is used for editing footage on-site, and to be honest, most of the time, the rMBP gets the job done for the most part, except for the far-slower pace. But then, on-site editing is normally about 2-3 mins clips, while editing on the two nMPs involve footage that are usually more than half an hour each (combined footage normally).

Whichever it is, if you do serious rendering tasks for the most part, do it on the nMP. In my case, the rMBP is only used for on-site editing for short footages that have to be processed immediately to see how it looks like, mainly to see whether that segment needs to be re-shot or not.