New computer
-
Hello,
Been lurking from the start of these forums and have absorbed endless amounts of truly superb information from all of the moderators and members..... so thank-you very much! My question is about laptops..... my boss is going to get me a laptop to use at the office and also to take home and was wondering if anyone had any advice. I have a budget of about $1500.00 and I am a mac fan and have found a refurbished mac book pro in our budget with these specs :
Refurbished MacBook Pro 2.4GHz Intel Core i5
15.4-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen display (1440 x 900 pixel)
4GB (2 x 2GB) of 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
320GB Serial ATA @ 5400 rpm
8x double-layer SuperDrive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M graphics processor with 256MB of GDDR3 memorIs this okay or are there better options for the money..... I'm concerned with opengl and video cards primarily.....
The pic is what we primarily are trying to achieve.... not nearly as good as content here but I improve all the time so maybe someday....
-
They seem like pretty decent specs to me, but it depends on what you're using it for. I think that processor is a quad-core, which is why it's got a pretty low clock speed. I'd say that's more geared towards rendering where you can use all those cores. If you aren't doing any rendering with this, I'd recommend finding a dual-core with a higher clock speed. If you've been lurking for so long you probably already know, but for the others who don't - SU uses only one core of your CPU to render geometry. And the videocard only really comes into play when you turn on textures and/or shadows. So for modeling what you want is a nice high clock speed, regardless of how many cores you've got. And CPU is more important than video card because you'll always see the geometry but you have the option to toggle off the textures and shadows for speed.
-Brodie
-
that's not a quad (none of the macbook pros are quads)
i dunno, i bought a refurb mbp i7 15" a couple of months ago and i gotta say it's excellent
as in amazing excellent and it runs sketchup very well..mine has a slightly faster clock speed (2.66ghz w/ turbo up to 3.33ghz) than what you're looking at and a 512mb 330M instead of the 256 but i honestly don't think i'd notice much difference if any between the two computers running sketchup.
if you're set on getting a mac laptop then you've chosen the best you're going to get for $1500.
buy it. -
Gotcha, I was looking here http://www.intel.com/products/processor/corei5/specifications.htm which doesn't list a dual core 2.4 processor but perhaps those are only desktop processors.
I forgot about the turbo technology, that's a good point and should help out significantly. To my eye the price seems a bit high for those specs still, but that's a mac for you. I'm more familiar with PC's.
-brodie
-
Yes, I agree with Jeff. The spec sounds great. Don't hesitate, buy it!
Tom
-
Thanks to all for the reply...... I should have mentioned we are thinking abut getting into rendering a little.... podium and maybe some photoshop...... is this rig still up to task?
-
I would say so. Particularly with Podium. Presumably you've got a desktop for your final renders but this should be just fine for test renders (and finals to I guess they'll just take a bit longer) and any PS work your doing.
-Brodie
-
Thanks again Brodie.....I think we will give a try.
Advertisement