Upgrade Early 2013 -> Mid-2015 MBP?

[ee99ee]

Hi. I have a 15" MacBook Pro Retina, Early 2013. 2.4 GHz Intel Core i7, 8GB of RAM, Intel HD Graphics 4000 1GB and NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M. I run the Retina at max resolution and when I'm at my desk, connect it to a 27" Apple Cinema as the primary monitor (and continue to use the laptop screen as a secondary monitor).

I'm moving to China in a couple of weeks and was thinking about upgrading to the latest version. The main difference is additional RAM and video card. I definitely feel the video card struggles to keep up sometimes with this high-resolution Retina screen.

Do you think the upgrade is worth it? I figure it cost about $1500 by the time I sell this one and take a loss. I'm moving to China from the US soon, so if I'm going to do it then I should do it now; it's even more expensive there.

Thoughts?

 

[Dead0k]

your card should not struggle
So basically if you will struggle financially there in China or will be equal as you have now - then sell and buy a new one.
Keep in mind that almost everyone dreams to buy macs in USA...

 

[ee99ee]

I'm kind of on the fence. It's not so much the money, it's more a question of am I going to see any improvement in performance? I would think the additional RAM and disk space would be worth it alone, but aside from that how much more performant is the video card compared to what I have now?

 

[Theros]

I had the cMBP 15" 2012 and in some stuff i see improvements with my MBPr 2015" (Dedicated GPU), specially in the SSD and OpenCL. In games and some random stuff maybe it would be the same.

Sometimes i play in OS X (Dota 2) and i see a 10-20 fps improvement over my old mac, but i think that the SSD itself and the display in my case, was worth.

 

[TechZeke]

Hi. I have a 15" MacBook Pro Retina, Early 2013. 2.4 GHz Intel Core i7, 8GB of RAM, Intel HD Graphics 4000 1GB and NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M. I run the Retina at max resolution and when I'm at my desk, connect it to a 27" Apple Cinema as the primary monitor (and continue to use the laptop screen as a secondary monitor).

I'm moving to China in a couple of weeks and was thinking about upgrading to the latest version. The main difference is additional RAM and video card. I definitely feel the video card struggles to keep up sometimes with this high-resolution Retina screen.

Do you think the upgrade is worth it? I figure it cost about $1500 by the time I sell this one and take a loss. I'm moving to China from the US soon, so if I'm going to do it then I should do it now; it's even more expensive there.

Thoughts?

Your machine is fine. If its already meeting your needs, then a 2015 machine won't do anything especially since your current rMBP is already running on SSD. Additional RAM won't help if you aren't running out of it now.

Also, even my Iris Pro Late 2013 15" isn't as smooth when scaled to 1920x1200(remember, the machine as to render 3840x2400, then scale down to the screen which difficult for any GPU). If you run it at the default, its silky smooth.

 

[duervo]

The storage speed in the 2015 is significantly faster than the 2013.

2013 uses PCIe 2.0 with 2 lanes.

2015 uses PCIe 3.0 with 4 lanes.

Everything else being equal, you will receive double the SSD performance with the 2015 than you do with your 2013.

The rest of the differences aren't as substantial, but as a sum of the whole do their part towards pushing the 2015 more towards the "upgrade worthy" end of the spectrum.

 

[waquzy]

I would say yes and no. SSD does make a big difference however as it is only less than 5 months before the 2016 line up is revealed, you might as well as wait.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

The storage speed in the 2015 is significantly faster than the 2013.

2013 uses PCIe 2.0 with 2 lanes.

2015 uses PCIe 3.0 with 4 lanes.

Everything else being equal, you will receive double the SSD performance with the 2015 than you do with your 2013.

The rest of the differences aren't as substantial, but as a sum of the whole do their part towards pushing the 2015 more towards the "upgrade worthy" end of the spectrum.

Only in sustained read/write which is rarely the main use of your SSD where random I/O access is the main bottleneck and it seems this is fairly standard accross consumer SSD's at the moment.

 

[duervo]

Only in sustained read/write which is rarely the main use of your SSD where random I/O access is the main bottleneck and it seems this is fairly standard accross consumer SSD's at the moment.

That totally depends on the customer's workload.

 

[ayeying]

No, It's not worth it for a very minor update. Especially now since it's fairly mid cycle, might as well go for the next one that comes out

 

[thatanonymoususer]

I would suggest waiting. USB C is just around the corner with Thunderbolt 3 and the possibility of Intel-supported external graphics cards since it's now part of the Thunderbolt 3 spec. I know it's probably more than what you want to try, but if you're going for "ultimate graphics", using an external graphics card is probably going to get you pretty far with your current Thunderbolt2. I was able to play through Tomb Raider on max settings using an NVIDIA GTX 670 eGPU on my 2012 rMBP on Thunderbolt 1. I usually don't have any issues with the internal GTX 650M if all I'm doing is using triple-monitors (one WQHD on DisplayPort and one 1080p on HDMI). What apps are making you lag?