Upgrade i5 MBP 15" or buy new i7 MBP 15"

[mickliq]

I have a 2010 MBP with 2.53ghz i5. I upgraded the RAM to 8GB on day 1 from OWC.

I knew when I purchased it that the 2011 MBP were imminent but needed it in January...

I'd like to upgrade to SSD. Previously didn't want to make the move as 512GB SSD was pretty price prohibitive. At $1000 for 512GB aftermarket it now seems to make sense?

Should I:

(a) just upgrade my HD to SSD on my i5 2.53ghz MBP - if so, is the 6GB/s speed irrelevant for me? I think the motherboard of my MBP doesn't support more than 3GB/s?!?

(b) sell the i5 and buy a new 2011 i7 MBP. If I do that, do I buy the SSD from Apple (presumably a 3GB/S?) or buy something aftermarket? I know Apple is a premium but I read somewhere that Lion might not support TRIM for anything other than "Apple" drives?!?

I know I can save some money by sticking with the 2010 MBP i5 and purchasing the aftermarket SSD, but the question is, in terms of performance, what about the Sandy Bridge i7?

Thanks for your views!

 

[letoast]

Assuming that your usage doesn't frequently max out the CPU, just get a 6Gbps SSD and see how that goes. You may find the performance to be sufficient, and more beneficial than the expense and hassle of upgrading to a whole new machine. But if you find you really should upgrade to the new MBP, you have a top-spec SSD that you can drop in it.

And if you don't often use your optical drive, just move your HDD to an internal optical drive caddy (http://newmodeus.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=259). It's not like your MP3 or video collection needs to be accessed at SSD speeds, so personally I think a big SSD is currently a glorious waste of money. For example, my operating system/apps partition will never fill the 60GB I have allocated for it, so a 120GB SSD is more than enough.

 

[raysmd]

the real answer is, what else would you be benefiting from the upgrade?

for me, I went from a early 2009 C2D at 2.66GHz to the current i7. BUT, the two reasons were: new hi-res anti-glare screen and faster processor (the 2nd reason will only benefit me occasionally). The 1st reason is the main reason for my upgrade and let me tell you it was well worth it. I also put in an aftermarket SSD (intel 320 ssd 120GB).


so, are you going to benefit from anything else with your upgrade? if you're not going to notice the processor speed bump, then forget about it. Just upgrade the ssd.

 

[mickliq]

the real answer is, what else would you be benefiting from the upgrade?

for me, I went from a early 2009 C2D at 2.66GHz to the current i7. BUT, the two reasons were: new hi-res anti-glare screen and faster processor (the 2nd reason will only benefit me occasionally). The 1st reason is the main reason for my upgrade and let me tell you it was well worth it. I also put in an aftermarket SSD (intel 320 ssd 120GB).


so, are you going to benefit from anything else with your upgrade? if you're not going to notice the processor speed bump, then forget about it. Just upgrade the ssd.

Generally the most processor intensive thing I do is run Parallels and Office 2011 apps. I just find my MBP isn't as snappy as it could be. I tend to run a lot of apps at the same time and I run a 24" external LCD along the 1680 x 1050 internal display. My gut feeling is that my bottleneck now is more about HD speed than processor, although 4 cores may indeed help with something like Parallels (freeing the other cores to run Mac OS X)?

 

[topocalypse]

performace gain from upgrading i5 to i7 is marginal compared to upgrading from HDD to SSD. Therefore, I would rather upgrade to SSD and keep the i5.