Hi, my friend is going to buy a macbook this weekend. She is a graphic designer, who uses photoshop, quark and illustrator. She asked me what macbook she should get. I took a look at them and told her that the major difference I see is screen size. I noticed some minor differences in specs and wanted to understand/clarify some things.
All the video cards are essentially the same - Nvidia Geforce 8600M Gt. The lower end model has 256mb of ram and the others have 512. Other than that I see an increase in 100mhz in cpu speed every tier we go up. The hard drive being 50gb larger is pretty much meaningless to us because she most likely will be using her external hard drive in combination with her laptop. I told her to get the 7200rpm drive to access information more quickly. I thought that would help, and ram would be a nice thing to get more of also.
However, how can I tell what is enough mb in a video card for her programs. What does the video card really do? I don't really understand all the benchmark tests that they do and was wondering if anyone could explain/show me some technical things. I know a little but not enough. I want to make sure she gets a good purchase. She doesn't want to go over kill. Any suggestions, insults or whatever would be appreciated. [I understand most terminology because im a *cough* PC user that builds them on occasion]
All the video cards are essentially the same - Nvidia Geforce 8600M Gt. The lower end model has 256mb of ram and the others have 512. Other than that I see an increase in 100mhz in cpu speed every tier we go up. The hard drive being 50gb larger is pretty much meaningless to us because she most likely will be using her external hard drive in combination with her laptop. I told her to get the 7200rpm drive to access information more quickly. I thought that would help, and ram would be a nice thing to get more of also.
However, how can I tell what is enough mb in a video card for her programs. What does the video card really do? I don't really understand all the benchmark tests that they do and was wondering if anyone could explain/show me some technical things. I know a little but not enough. I want to make sure she gets a good purchase. She doesn't want to go over kill. Any suggestions, insults or whatever would be appreciated. [I understand most terminology because im a *cough* PC user that builds them on occasion]