What 15" model do you guys recommend? The 2.4GHz or 2.53GHz? Is the extra price justified by the specs in the higher model? Or does the entry level 15" represent the better value?
The vRAM gets you nowhere, shoving 512MB on that card is like installing 2GB of RAM in a 1.6Ghz Pentium 4 machine. It's pointless, anything that needs the RAM is going to be so bottlenecked by the processor, the extra RAM won't matter.
Don't bother with the higher-end model. "Double the cache" may sound nice today, but it really won't make much difference in the long run. 4 years from now, both will just be some variant of slow. Except the 2.53 model makes you pay another $500. The vRAM gets you nowhere, shoving 512MB on that card is like installing 2GB of RAM in a 1.6Ghz Pentium 4 machine. It's pointless, anything that needs the RAM is going to be so bottlenecked by the processor, the extra RAM won't matter.
4GB of RAM and 320GB HDD can be had from 3rd parties for about $170, far less than the $500 you're paying for two other fairly silly placebo upgrades.
This information is spot on in my opinion. 99% of users don't even utilize half of their processing power these days...
Really inaccurate. A 2.53Ghz C2D is no slouch and in the case of playing most games the video card will be the bottle neck not the dual core c2d. Vram is REALLY valuable. Two years ago NVIDIA offered the 8800 GTX with 768MB vram and clock speeds were not what they are today and yet, the 768 proved insanely useful. I downgraded from the 768MB 8800 GTX to a 512MB 8800 GT and the slowdown was noticeable and this is with a 2.5ghz X2.
Twice the cache is a big deal and so is the vram.
The 8800GTX is roughly 4x as powerful as the 9600M GT. You missed my entire point. 512MB is nice if the GPU is powerful enough. My point was that anything that needs the extra vRAM will be so bottlenecked by the GPU, it won't matter.