Need Advice M3Pro: More GPU or more storage?

[Gambet]

Some advice will be really appreciated.

I'm going to buy the new 14 Macbook Pro M3Pro, and I'm deciding where to invest extra 200$. Do I invest them in a 1TB SSD, or it's better to invest in 12 core CPU and 18 core GPU??

Thanks for the help!!!

 

[Delarock]

It all depends what are your plans or purpose with this maschine

 

[Gambet]

Good answer 😆. My fault.

I will use it as a daily computer, including photo and video editing (drone video/photo, 360 cameras, some RAW photos…) but not professionally
No Gaming.
Not expecting to have my complete photo library on it, as it is much bigger than 1TB

Thanks!!!

 

[Delarock]

I would go for 1 TB. I dont think you will gain much by buying more GPU, just few seconds during rendering time. I do basic stuff , sometimes some photo editing, and went back from M1 MAX 32 to mac mini M1 and during my workflow i cant see any difference (mac mini is 16 GB ram)

 

[1BadManVan]

How much do you keep on your local drive vs the cloud or external drives? If you generally store the majority of your pics and video on something else external anyways, I would opt for the more powerful chip instead.

 

[David1986H]

Personally id go for the extra cores as this can't be changed. Where as if you run out of storage, you can easily use external ssd's/cloud

 

[danwells]

Watch out for the 6 e-cores... The entry-level M3 Pro only has one more PERFORMANCE core than a base M3 You might get more speed out of a M2 Pro MBP with more performance cores. If you can get an upper-end M2 Pro for the price of an entry M3 Pro, you're getting eight P-cores instead of five (that will MORE than compensate for the per-core speed difference.

 

[playtech1]

Ultimately it's down to the individual user's storage needs but I find there is a massive difference between 512GB and 1TB in practical terms - with 1TB I can probably carry my whole iTunes music library, a bunch of TV shoes, plus a local mirror of my cloud stored work files of a reasonable size, plus I can install all the apps I want (including a few games) and still have a decent chunk left over.

Extra CPU cores are nice of course, but won't be game-changing for any tasks, they would just in some cases make them complete a little (probably seconds) quicker. Whereas the time you will have to spend dealing with a full SSD can take hours if you regularly bump into capacity limits.