Help With New Computer

[NFRs2000NYC]

So my girlfriend gave her brother her laptop, and needs a new computer. Now, her budget is $1000, but for that money, I think I'd rather take her $1000, give her my loaded to the gills macbook, and get myself something new and fresh.

My options are as follows...I ONLY do photo processing and absolutely no gaming or 3D graphic editing of any kind. I also already own the 23" cinema display.

My options are to get a new....

1)Loaded to the gills Macbook with 4GB or RAM and a 2.4Core Duo
2)2.53Core Duo Macbook Pro with 4GB or RAM (15")
3)24" Imac with a 3.08Core Duo and 4GB or RAM.

4)"Confused Option Here" I have been itching to buy a Mac Pro (the desktop.) The stripped down version with a single XEON 2.8 chip with 2GB of RAM is only $2299, the same price as the other three options. However, I know very little about upgrading Mac products. Can I buy a XEON chip on my own? Should I get a dual processor one from the get go? Help!?

My gripe with the macbook pro is that the extra video card chip would only be useful in 3D applications (I think) and the extra .13Ghz over the regular macbook shouldn't make that big a difference in performance.

Any advice is appreciated.

[yoby]

So my girlfriend gave her brother her laptop, and needs a new computer. Now, her budget is $1000, but for that money, I think I'd rather take her $1000, give her my loaded to the gills macbook, and get myself something new and fresh.

My options are as follows...I ONLY do photo processing and absolutely no gaming or 3D graphic editing of any kind. I also already own the 23" cinema display.

My options are to get a new....

1)Loaded to the gills Macbook with 4GB or RAM and a 2.4Core Duo
2)2.53Core Duo Macbook Pro with 4GB or RAM (15")
3)24" Imac with a 3.08Core Duo and 4GB or RAM.

4)"Confused Option Here" I have been itching to buy a Mac Pro (the desktop.) The stripped down version with a single XEON 2.8 chip with 2GB of RAM is only $2299, the same price as the other three options. However, I know very little about upgrading Mac products. Can I buy a XEON chip on my own? Should I get a dual processor one from the get go? Help!?

My gripe with the macbook pro is that the extra video card chip would only be useful in 3D applications (I think) and the extra .13Ghz over the regular macbook shouldn't make that big a difference in performance.

Any advice is appreciated.

If I was you.. I get the macbook pro 15 inches PREVIOUS GEN the APRIL 2008 model that is on sale at AMAZON is around 1459$ or so so in the end you end up paying 459$ if you get the 1000$ from your GF...

Then add RAM, ETC FOR THE EXTRA BOOST
My 2 cents

[Tony-S]

My gripe with the macbook pro is that the extra video card chip would only be useful in 3D applications (I think) and the extra .13Ghz over the regular macbook shouldn't make that big a difference in performance.

The video card is used by some apps for accelerated performance, notably Aperture, Photoshop CS4 (but not CS3) and Pixelmator. The higher-speed chip also has a larger L2 cache, which can add a bit of a performance boost.

If I was you.. I get the macbook pro 15 inches PREVIOUS GEN the APRIL 2008 model that is on sale

I'm not so sure this is good advice if the OP plans to migrate to Snow Leopard. It will leverage NVidia's CUDA technology to take advantage of OpenCL and multi-core parallel processing use of the gpu for things other than graphics processing. CUDA is not on the 8600 board in the last MBP, but the 9400 and 9600 on the new MB and MBP do.

[yoby]

Well, all depends... I use my macbook pro for LR and slight PS. The heavy editing is done on the desktop...

If you have only one PC then that might be slight different story... I myself got that deal that I mentioned and upgraded from the old Powebook G4 to this April model... and added the 2 gb of extra RAM