What would you do?

The obvious question would be: What are you supposed to be doing on it?

I would in most cases opt for more ram.

 

Usually when I travel I take my laptop.

However, if I were leaving for six months, I'd decide whether a more powerful machine would be of greater benefit to me. In most cases, I find it smarter to leave the more expensive or harder to replace equipment in a secure location (like home) and travel with as little as possible.

But, I have never left home for six months at a time...

 

Really depends what sort of work your gonna be doing on it... perhaps it'll be good to give readers an idea of what you'll be using it for, or what's the typical nature of your work.


Unlike NickyD, I don't take my laptop with me when i'm travelling over sees for work, mostly because the slowness of the machine will drive me insane. And I'm not going away for a day or two. A typical trip for me usually last a few months to a year at a time.

 

Well, do you use your VM with OSX running quite a bit? If you absolutely need your VM running while you are doing something in OSX (or vice versa), I would go with the Octo-Core. The quad (from what I hear) would be better for Photoshop, but the VM would eat a bigger chunk out of the quad then the octo.

Or at least, that's my reasoning.

 

The quad core might be a little better for photoshop, because of the faster clock speed and the fact that photoshop is most dependent on the amount of RAM and speed of HDD's, not multi-core CPUs. If you want the better machine with you, i'd take the 8 core because of the RAM, and because you indicated that you'll use photoshop and VM.

 

Same specs the rest of the way? I think i would take the quad core. I don't need an excessive amount of ram (I havn't ever had major paging issues on my new MP with 3gig or my MB with 4). I do however enjoy me some speed