Upgrade 13" base MBP to what

[NutFlush920]

I have a base 2010 13" MBP with the core 2 dou chip. I already know I want to upgrade this year but to what?

The most cpu extensive thing I use my MBP is to encode my bluray movies to mp4 to be played on my Apple TV's.

Apple charges $500 for going with a 256gb SSD and I can get a 256gb Crucial M4 for $214 or 512gb Crucial M4 for $400 on Amazon which to me, would be a must. I'm fine with a 13" display but just how much better is the quad core i7 over the dual core i5? I'm sure either has to be way better then what I have now but $400 faster?

I'd love the flagship 15" MBP but can't afford that. What does everyone here think I should go for as far as the MBP and SSD?

 

[dbam987]

I know I'm resurrecting a dead thread eek, but I am conducting my own research on upgrading from a 2010 MBP13 to a 2012 MBP13.

The Core-i5/Core-i7 processors in the 2012 MBP is about two-times more powerful than the Core 2 Duo processors in the 2010 MBP, when comparing Geekbench scores for the two models. The 2010 MBP13 yields somewhere around 3.7K whereas the 2012 MBP13 gets upwards of 8K.

A key feature of the Core-i5 / Core-i7 CPU's is the Turbo Boost feature, which overclocks one of the core's auto-magically to the 3 GHz range if it senses you're doing something CPU intensive (i.e. gaming or video encoding). Plus, the new processors have hyper-threading enabled, yielding 4 cores* of awesomeness. The 2010 MBP13 do not sport hyper-threading or turbo-boost.

* Even though the processors are dual-cores, Intel has magic pixie dust that efficiently doubles throughput per core.