macbookpro 15 question?

iam planning on getting a mbp 15 and cant decide on what should i upgrade: should i get 8gb of ram or upgrade the processor to 3.06ghz?

iam going to use this for video editing, and school. i also qualify for the education discount!

You will see much more of an improvement by increasing the RAM.

+1^^^^ plus budget a large FW800 external if you are doing video.

Even better might be a 17" which would give you the option of ExpressCard slot. With this you can use e-sata drives, which are even faster than fw 800.

I recently got an ExpressCard E-sata card, and and dual slot e-sata drive dock - both for about $65. I can now connect two sata drives together, used as a RAID, or as separate drives. Mondo fast transfers on my 17 Unibody.

I have an eSata card in my 15mbp was sad when they got rid of it on the new 15's

romeo26 wrote in post #8987980
iam planning on getting a mbp 15 and cant decide on what should i upgrade: should i get 8gb of ram or upgrade the processor to 3.06ghz?

iam going to use this for video editing, and school. i also qualify for the education discount!

As an IT professional, I would go with the bigger CPU for the simple fact that you won't be able to upgrade it in the future, whereas you will with RAM. Second, there isn't much of a speed difference between 4GB and 8GB of memory. And third, memory prices tend to drop over time.

Yes, apple glues their cpus into the board, so you won't be able to change that out any time. RAM can always be upgraded.

Now, if you don't already have a mac/mac software, there are other options where you can order cake and eat it too

Normally, I'd agree that getting the fastest chip you can get, is prudent with laptops.

However, the difference between 2.8 and 3ghz is just not enough to notice. Seriously, you'd be better off spending your money on maxing out the RAM which you will definitely notice, especially if you're going to be use (multiple) Adobe products.

It really all depends on the person's computer habits. For me, running Aperture, Photoshop CS4 (5 images in the 200-500MB range), Mail, iCal, Remote Desktop Connection and Firefox at the same time still leaves me 1.5GB free from 4GB.

RAM

I'm with Maxxum on this one, even my 2gb laptop (which is pushing it) could do LR2 (10k catalog) and photoshop (five layer 10mp tiff) without bogging down (and with outlook, 30 tab firefox, and some random pdf open, and most of all, Vista 32bit). 4gb is the sweet spot right now, in about 2-4 years, 8gb will.

There's always the point of diminishing return. With CPUs, as someone wrote, the dif of 2.8 vs 3.0 ghz isn't much, but costs lots more. 4 GB of laptop RAM is a great bang for the buck. 8 GB is better if you can afford it, still a better investment than 0.2 GHz

mcluckie wrote in post #8992519
There's always the point of diminishing return. With CPUs, as someone wrote, the dif of 2.8 vs 3.0 ghz isn't much, but costs lots more. 4 GB of laptop RAM is a great bang for the buck. 8 GB is better if you can afford it, still a better investment than 0.2 GHz

I think the point is: if you are going to spend money now, spend it on the CPU. If not, just wait a bit and then upgrade ram. Saves OP money, and since I doubt OP already does photo/video at the level OP will in a year or two, then why spend the money now when it won't help now, and it'll be cheaper when it will help?