Upgrade the RAM or graphic card?

[Canadia69]

hi,

I will be starting school in September in graphic design and will be buying a macbook pro. The course curriculum actually says to buy a 15inch macbook pro with at least 16gb of ram, 500gb ssd.

I am thinking of getting the 2.3ghz i9 and will be stepping up to 1TB ssd just to make it future proof. Now I dont know which i should upgrade next, the RAM or the graphics card.

I cant afford to upgrade both unfortunately. So from a graphic design perspective, which do you think is more useful, upgrading the ram to 32gb of RAM or the graphics card to the pro vega 20? (is the pro vega 16 a good middle ground?

thank you!

 

[FlyingDutch]

what kind of graphic design ? Vectorial or 3D rendering ?
In the first case I would opt for more RAM.
In casa of 3D rendering I would upgrade the GPU.

 

[Stephen.R]

If you want to future proof it, forgo the SSD upgrade - you can add a large (capacity wise, not physically) just-as-fast external SSD at a cheaper $/GB cost later, memory you can’t never upgrade and gpu you can’t upgrade and remain portable.

 

[FlyingDutch]

there is not such a thing like a future proof electronic device.

 

[Canadia69]

what kind of graphic design ? Vectorial or 3D rendering ?
In the first case I would opt for more RAM.
In casa of 3D rendering I would upgrade the GPU.

not sure but mostly web design and photoshop, i already do a lot of wordpress.

 

[maerz001]

Well i doubt u need more than 16gb or high end gpu in next 4-5 years.
And even 512 gb ssd should be fine for years to fill up with webdesign and pictures.

3d renders like blender or cinema 4d is a different story. But than u are better off with an imac

 

[leman]

Neither, you will be fine with the base stuff even. If you really want to upgrade something, get the Vega. Or even better, wait until nov, there will likely be a GPU refresh.

 

[eulslix]

If you're gonna work with software like Sketch or Affinity, its gonna eat up more than 8GB, but less than 16GB. I'm easily capable of pushing my machine to the limit (back when I had a top specced 15" 2018), but I'm not quite sure what's the limiting factor here. I'm quite certain it's the CPU, but there's not much you can do here.

Out of personal interest: So you guys are confident anything above 16GB is overkill for now?

 

[Stephen.R]

So you guys are confident anything above 16GB is overkill for now?

No. There is literally no such thing as too much memory. Get as much as you can afford practically, and IMO, factor it as more important than storage or GPU upgrades.

 

[FlyingDutch]

not sure but mostly web design and photoshop, i already do a lot of wordpress.

For that, probably 16 Gb are more than enough.

 

[Stephen.R]

I just noticed that OP mentioned the i9 model (i.e. the better 'stock' option).

OP: I don't honestly think you'll see as much benefit as you think from 2 extra cores at slightly lower clock.

Unless you specifically intend to do lots of stuff that requires specifically more CPU grunt than memory (i.e. compiling comes to mind) I personally think you'd be better off with the "base" 2.6Ghz i7, with the 32GB memory + 512 GB storage upgrades.

 

[Toutou]

The course curriculum actually says to buy a 15inch macbook pro with at least 16gb of ram, 500gb ssd.

mostly web design and photoshop

That's ridiculous. You could do that on my base model Pro from 2013. Put the money towards something nice, instead of useless and overpriced spec bumps.

 

[Canadia69]

That's ridiculous. You could do that on my base model Pro from 2013. Put the money towards something nice, instead of useless and overpriced spec bumps.

heres a link to the course info, it talks about the kind of computer needed in the Additional Information tab. There is also the list of software that we are using.

http://www.johnabbott.qc.ca/academics/career-programs/graphicweb/
[doublepost=1566820916][/doublepost]

I just noticed that OP mentioned the i9 model (i.e. the better 'stock' option).

OP: I don't honestly think you'll see as much benefit as you think from 2 extra cores at slightly lower clock.

Unless you specifically intend to do lots of stuff that requires specifically more CPU grunt than memory (i.e. compiling comes to mind) I personally think you'd be better off with the "base" 2.6Ghz i7, with the 32GB memory + 512 GB storage upgrades.

Interesting, i thought i9 is just more powerfull than i7. but i just noticed now that the i7 is 2.9ghz vs the i9 with is 2.3ghz..hmm

 

[eulslix]

heres a link to the course info, it talks about the kind of computer needed in the Additional Information tab. There is also the list of software that we are using.

http://www.johnabbott.qc.ca/academics/career-programs/graphicweb/
[doublepost=1566820916][/doublepost]

Interesting, i thought i9 is just more powerfull than i7. but i just noticed now that the i7 is 2.9ghz vs the i9 with is 2.3ghz..hmm

Yeah I don't think you need much of a powerful machine for that. You'd be perfectly fine with a 13" machine if it wasn't for the screen estate.

You'll be learning a lot about design basics, which is a lot about typography, color theory, composition and grids... none of which requires a powerful machine to practice (and neither master, which is an accomplishment for itself). That's my impression after throwing a quick look at it... might be wrong though.

I'm still a junior in design, but I've done my fair share of B2B and B2C projects. Some of them I did on a 2013 13" MBP, which isn't particularly enjoyable, but doable (we're talking here about huge projects though, with hundreds of symbols).

So... you don't need that much, to get into design.

 

[Stephen.R]

The i9 has 8 cores vs 6 in the i7.

Yes the i9 will be faster for some tasks, but no I don’t think you will notice much difference.

For what it’s worth I use a stock 2018 MBP15 as my spare/travel machine - I routinely have anywhere from 1 to 10 VMs running plus usually at least one (and often several) IntelliJ IDEA (a reasonably resource heavy IDE) project Windows and CPU is rarely if ever the bottleneck.

Edit: to clarify, mine is a 6 core i7 with the base 16GB and I’d definitely have upgraded the memory if it weren’t bought at last minute (needed to replace a failed machine, that’s what they had in stock).

 

[LordeOurMother]

You don't really need an i9, i7 will do.

512 is enough. External SSDs can be bought cheaply.

With that in mind, you can never have enough Ram/Graphics card. Graphics are what age in a machine the fastest, tbh.

 

[Lyrca]

You don't really need an i9, i7 will do.

512 is enough. External SSDs can be bought cheaply.

With that in mind, you can never have enough Ram/Graphics card. Graphics are what age in a machine the fastest, tbh.

I agree. I think you will be better off sticking with a 512Gb ssd while upgrading both the RAM and graphics.

 

[collin_]

If they said you need at least 16 GB RAM, then you should be good with 16. You probably don't need the i9 either. Furthermore there is really no need to upgrade the internal storage when you can get a blazing fast external 1TB NVMe drive for $90 (Intel 660p). I wanna say that you also don't need to upgrade the GPU, but since you're doing graphic design, it does seem likely that you could benefit from it. Do you need it though? Probably not.

So... basically you could probably spend a lot less money and still be fine.

 

[Canadia69]

after long consideration, i will go with the base model 2.3GHz 8-core i9/512gb that comes with the radeon pro 560x.

I think you guys are right, i dont need all that power..would have gone with the very base model but im already ruinning out of space on my 256gb 12inch macbook