08-23-2011, 02:57 PM

Hey guys,

I'm looking into taking the plunge and join the Mac club however, having never used a Mac before in my life hereby I seek your wise advice

In short, I currently have a Toshiba A100 from 2006 which is not anymore up there with the tasks I need to do which is:

- Recording audio into a DAW and playing multiple tracks with effects
- Editing Full HD video without hiccups and synchronizing video to the audio I record with the DAW
- Future proof (as in... still able to run things 100% in some 4 years time)
- The occasional 1080p / 720p video watching
- Normal day to day web browsing, etc

Given that my first 2 requirements are the most demanding, I think I need a 15" screen to properly use the DAW and video editing tools. So that sets me in the MacBook 15 territory (I don't think the 13" is going to cut it, specially since max res is 1200 wide).

Now should I go for the entry level i7 2.0 Ghz 15" and upgrade both the hard drive to 7200 rpm (to ensure proper video / sound editing - hard drive intensive tasks I figure) and screen upgrade to 1600 so more fits the screen ?

Or should I go for the i7 2.2 Ghz and keep the 5400 rpm drive and 1400 pixel screen but benefit from more CPU speed and the AMD Radeon HD 6750M met 1 GB GDDR5 ? What difference does this graphics card make to the AMD Radeon HD 6490M met 256 MB GDDR5 in real world scenarios ? I mean, I'm not a power gamer so I guess it doesn't really matter for me since video encoding / decoding is more about CPU/hard drive than graphics card (unless the graphics card has a video encoding / decoding chip itself) ?

I've considered also other brands which can set me with a 7200 rpm drive, 8Gg of memory (instead of 4Gb in the Mac), 2.0 Ghz i7, Full HD screen (1920 p) on a 15" screen for substantially less, with Windows 7. Again, having never used a Mac before, is it possible that a Mac with less resources still out performs the Windows machine ?
For example, maybe the OSX file system is more efficient than NTFS, therefore having the Macbook with a 5400 rpm drive still outperforming a Windows with a 7200 rpm ? And maybe better memory management could mean that the Macbook with 4Gb is equivalent to the Windows with 8 Gb?
I'm not trying to start a Apple - Windows fight here... I'm just trying to realize if I even need the 7200 rpm drive at all or if a 5400 rpm will make do perfectly fine!

Thanks for any advice guys

08-24-2011, 12:25 AM

Go for the best CPU you can afford. HDD's are much more easily upgraded. I would get the faster CPU and GPU and a 5,400 HDD and upgrade to an SSD in the near future.

08-24-2011, 03:49 AM

What would be a real world "measurable" difference between

2,0-GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 + AMD Radeon HD 6490M met 256 MB GDDR5
2,2-GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 + AMD Radeon HD 6750M met 1 GB GDDR5

Because this is setting the prices apart 400 eur / 575 usd and I'm just trying to find a justification for the big difference. If there's one.. then I'd happy to go for the faster one... otherwise... if it's about encoding 1 minute of video in 5 seconds instead of 7 then I don't care so much...

08-24-2011, 08:47 AM

You won't see a huge leap in encoding times with the 2.2 vs the 2.0 but there is a solid performance difference between those two video cards. Just depends on if that's important to you. I'm a firm believer in faster hard drives - so I would definitely go for the 7200rpm drive.

There are some benchmarks floating around that will answer your question. I'll try to post back with a link.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4205/t...andy-bridge/16

http://www.macworld.com/article/1578...enchmarks.html