Upgrade 1st gen unibody to 2011?

[Tronic]

I'm sure this question has been beaten to hell by now, but why once more? I currently own a late 2008 15" C2D 2.4ghz 4gb 500gb HDD unibody that I bought as a refurb in early 2009. I'm in architecture grad school and use it for CAD/design work while at school and occasional gaming/web surfing while home. When at home, I do all CAD/design on the desktop.

Reasons I want to upgrade: Bootcamp CAD/Rendering is unbearable, gaming is okay but it gets super hot, and I can't stand a conventional HDD anymore after switching all my other computers over to SSD and i'd like to up the ram a little.

Option 1:
So I can sell the 2008 for about 1k and buy a 2011 refurb this summer for approx. 1.5k and then add a SSD for 150. So the upgrade will cost me $700 about.

Option 2:
Just upgrade to a SSD and add an additional 4gb of memory to the 2008 and make do until 2012, when I plan to upgrade to a MBA for portability since I wont be doing design anymore and can get by with a 13"



My question is, are the new i processors and graphics cards going to give me noticeable performance increases for my uses or will upgrading the 2008 solve the majority of my problems?

 

[Tronic]

anyone have an opinion?

 

[ayeying]

Isn't that system capable of 6GB or even 8GB ram?

I would just upgrade and keep it if you can wait. If not, go ahead, but after you're done with design, you'll be looking to sell that for another system again. For the same $700, you can upgrade quite a bit with the current system.

 

[cambookpro]

I went from late 2008 > early 2011. Bar the airport issues, it seems a solid upgrade. Not amazingly faster, but FCP and CS5 stuff seems quicker.

 

[vincenz]

Isn't that system capable of 6GB or even 8GB ram?

I would just upgrade and keep it if you can wait. If not, go ahead, but after you're done with design, you'll be looking to sell that for another system again. For the same $700, you can upgrade quite a bit with the current system.

Yes, up to 8 GB. Even the 13" aluminum unibody MacBooks from late 2008 are capable of 8 GB.

 

[Tronic]

Yeah I know I can add ram to the 2008. I guess it does make more sense to just replace my 4gb with 8gb and then add a vertex 3.