Need help deciding on the MacBook Air

[seewor]

Am planning on getting the 2012 Air with 128GB SSD,1.8Ghz core i5 and 8GB Ram I would want to use it mainly for this:
-Casual machine-: like web browsing with like 12tabs open,twitter,skype all at once.
-Playing hd movies to 46inch HDTV through minidisplay port to HDMI
-:dev machine- I would install windows 7 through bootcamp only for visual studio 2010 ultimate & sql server
-i would also do dev work on the OS X partiiton, with dreamweaver cs6 and run the sluggish android emulator at once

That's pretty much what am gonna be using my system for.
Can the Air with the specs I mentioned be able to do my tasks succesfully ?
And would the fans kick in and/or the air get hot under such circumstance ? I also want to buy a 500gb usb 3.0 external hard drive just in case

Btw: is the HD 4000 equivalent to Radeon 5xxx my windows laptop from 2 years ago is using a radeon 5xxx GPU
EDIT: the GPU is actually Radeon 5650


Thanks

 

[KPOM]

Here are some benchmarks against the Radeon 5770. The Radeon is still quite a bit faster.

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.p...k=view&id=900&Itemid=63&limit=1&limitstart=11

 

[seewor]

Here are some benchmarks against the Radeon 5770. The Radeon is still quite a bit faster.

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.p...k=view&id=900&Itemid=63&limit=1&limitstart=11

Wow thanks
That's bad news to me because I intend to sell my windoze pc to raise some money for the Air and my windoze pc's gpu is the radeon 5xxx series I forgot the exact model so that means I would be a GPU loss with the new Air
But I hardly use the GPU I don't use it for gaming,or video encoding or such heavy tasks

 

[SlickShoes]

Wow thanks
That's bad news to me because I intend to sell my windoze pc to raise some money for the Air and my windoze pc's gpu is the radeon 5xxx series I forgot the exact model so that means I would be a GPU loss with the new Air
But I hardly use the GPU I don't use it for gaming,or video encoding or such heavy tasks

The ATi 5770 mentioned in that article is a desktop graphics card. All of the versions of the 5 series cards numbered below the 5770 were far worse in performance.

If you can let us know the actual card in your windows laptop this will be easier to compare, keep in mind that a laptop GFX card with the same looking model number as a desktop card will have vastly different performance.

 

[seewor]

The ATi 5770 mentioned in that article is a desktop graphics card. All of the versions of the 5 series cards numbered below the 5770 were far worse in performance.

If you can let us know the actual card in your windows laptop this will be easier to compare, keep in mind that a laptop GFX card with the same looking model number as a desktop card will have vastly different performance.

Its actually the 5650

-
Why is everyone focusing on the GPU part ? What about the other parts ?

 

[Mito]

New Intel HD 4000 is about 60% faster than Intel HD 3000 so should be no problem

 

[SlickShoes]

Am planning on getting the 2012 Air with 128GB SSD,1.8Ghz core i5 and 8GB Ram I would want to use it mainly for this:
-Casual machine-: like web browsing with like 12tabs open,twitter,skype all at once.
-Playing hd movies to 46inch HDTV through minidisplay port to HDMI
-:dev machine- I would install windows 7 through bootcamp only for visual studio 2010 ultimate & sql server
-i would also do dev work on the OS X partiiton, with dreamweaver cs6 and run the sluggish android emulator at once

That's pretty much what am gonna be using my system for.
Can the Air with the specs I mentioned be able to do my tasks succesfully ?
And would the fans kick in and/or the air get hot under such circumstance ? I also want to buy a 500gb usb 3.0 external hard drive just in case

Btw: is the HD 4000 equivalent to Radeon 5xxx my windows laptop from 2 years ago is using a radeon 5xxx GPU
EDIT: the GPU is actually Radeon 5650


Thanks

The GPU is better than the 5650m that you have in the PC laptop.
It will be a fine machine for your browsing needs.
It will play HD movies on an external screen, you will need some audio output though or the sound will just be coming from the macbook.
Installing Windows will eat up a fair bit of your HDD probably at least 30GB for your needs.
I'd recommend getting something like an 64GB flash drive to store things like movies and itunes library on so that they dont cut in to your HDD space.

 

[KPOM]

Its actually the 5650

-
Why is everyone focusing on the GPU part ? What about the other parts ?

We're focusing on the GPU because the CPU should be fine for light development work, and it handles a virtual machine well, particularly with 8GB. Is space going to be an issue (w/128GB)?

Since you mentioned gaming, the GPU is important.

 

[seewor]

^^ I won't be playing games with it. I have the xbox 360 I prefer console gaming to pc. Gaming, much more convinient

The GPU is better than the 5650m that you have in the PC laptop.
It will be a fine machine for your browsing needs.
It will play HD movies on an external screen, you will need some audio output though or the sound will just be coming from the macbook.
Installing Windows will eat up a fair bit of your HDD probably at least 30GB for your needs.
I'd recommend getting something like an 64GB flash drive to store things like movies and itunes library on so that they dont cut in to your HDD space.

I would get usb 3.0 external hard drive of 500gb in capacity.
The fresh winsows 32 bit install is 16gb, I would then disable hibernate & system restore and reduce paging size to 512mb

----------

So for simple tasks browsing skypinbg and tweeting all at once, the fans won't kick in right ?

 

[seewor]

No one wants to reply me