Should I downgrade my Macbook Pro Retina from 750m to Iris Pro

[johngwheeler]

Irish graphics!

I have the newest rmb with just the Irish graphics

With irish only your battery will last a lot longer, your machine won't get as hot, and tbh irish graphics are very sophisticated even tho they are integrated.

I find the Irish graphics have a permanent green hue to them. Also, on St. Patricks day, the graphics become very unstable and tend to fall over a lot....

 

[Macmark93]

I find the Irish graphics have a permanent green hue to them. Also, on St. Patricks day, the graphics become very unstable and tend to fall over a lot....

Hahaha dam I do that all the time, Iris grrr, yeah mine shout
''top of the morning ''to me'.

 

[iKrivetko]

I find the Irish graphics have a permanent green hue to them. Also, on St. Patricks day, the graphics become very unstable and tend to fall over a lot....

They also tend to produce strange noises for focal sake!

 

[KarmicKoala]

Irish graphics are all the rage these days

Is it at all ironic that I actually am Irish?

The way I see it is that the 750m is only marginally faster than the Iris Pro, if at all, and in tasks where it considerably outperforms it, they both aren't that good anyway. As in, if you can't comfortably play a game in 1080p on the Iris Pro, you'll likely have just as much trouble getting comfortable FPS on the 750m. It's just that the former will have, say, 5 fps, and the latter will be giving you 10. You can say that it's double the framerate, but ultimately it is unplayable on either chip. So unless whatever you are using on a regular basis strongly depends on Nvidia hardware or is specifically optimised for it, I'd say there's little reason to go for the model with the nvidia.

The Iris Pro is very impressive, but my research since my initial horror shows that Premiere Pro and FCPX specifically support the 750m. Encoding and exporting isn't time critical for me, but the quality of preview playback is, and the 750m will facilitate that nicely.This review gives an interesting overview.

I've basically decided to acquiesce to the fact that gaming and my work are not destined to live in the same machine.

Except on a Razer Blade Pro. Which I can't get, because I'm not American. I'd consider selling the Macbook maybe next year if I could upgrade to that or something similar, and I still didn't have a desktop PC.

----------

Case is out of stock (second round of production), but I've just put it here as a reference point: https://www.ncases.com

Indication of its size: Image

Obviously it won't house multiple graphics cards and 4 RAM slots and 5 billion hard drives, as the size is mini-ITX, but it definitely fits the space considerations, and if you invest in a proper (Intel) CPU and a top-of-the-range graphics card (nVidia), then 1 graphics card should be enough.



Definitely.

OS X isn't the premier gaming platform. If you want to game properly, then install Windows (possibly SteamOS due to optimisations).



It is a very good investment. I've had friends who bought it and install Windows to use it permanently, as they really appreciate the build quality of it.

That's a nice looking case, it's on the list for my hypothetical build.

I do really like this machine and am glad of the investment, although it does sting just a little that Apple / Intel couldn't get Broadwell here in time. I had waited a long time to buy and couldn't afford to wait any longer, certainly not this time next year.

My only wish is that Apple had included a GPU bump this year along with the CPU, using the same as last year seems a bit stingy. They're probably going to right to 900 series next year (if they still put GPU's in these things by then.)