Friend wants 15.4" MBP-- 3mb or 6mb cache? 256mb or 512mb vram?

My friend is ready to buy a Macbook Pro, but he's having trouble deciding whether to go with the lower end (2.4ghz 3mb 512mb video) or the mid price model (2.5ghz 6mb cache 512mb video).

He's a member of the developer thing that gives him a discount of $400 on the 2.4ghz and $500 on the 2.5ghz, so the prices are $1600 vs $2000.

The most demanding apps he will use are games like WoW and TF2, but also new games that come out over the next few years. I've seen posts on this board saying that the 8600M's memory bandwidth isn't enough to take advantage of the doubled memory. Does this only apply to the screen buffer, or also to textures? Will the GPU be able to access textures beyond the 256mb much faster than if they were in RAM?

Does the decision between 6mb vs 3mb L2 cache matter for games?


He wants it to last a long time, but I don't think there will be any noticeable benefit from the upgraded specs.

 

The 512mb vram will probably help performance some in games that use large textures and maps but at a resolution like 1440x900 I'm going to say the cards speed is going to come into play more than it's available memory. I kinda doubt an 8600M GT is going to last for several years playing new games that will be coming out. Probably be good enough for at least 1-2 years but it depends. It's better not to overbuy thinking you're getting something more future-proof when the future in technology usually changes quite a bit within just 6-12 months. I usually buy a new laptop every year and just sell the previous one. If you get a good discount when you buy and don't overpay then you're not losing all that much just getting a new laptop next year.

 

First thing he should understand, current GPU's can handle modern games okay. Crysis will still eat them alive. Depending on the rate of graphical quality increase over the next few years will dictate how long the card will last.

I would expect neither of those to run next years games at the highest graphics settings. But at least it only has to push 1440x900 instead of something higher.

I'm unsure about how much of an improvement you would see with the 512 vs 256.

Cache generally makes a good bit of difference, but right now, with most of the games not even supporting dual cores, its hard to say what difference the cache really makes. Whenever I buy processors, I look for the models with the highest level of cache.

But all in all, any hardcore gamer will want a desktop. There just isn't anything in the laptop world that can reasonably compete against say, an SLI system. And laptops can't be upgraded, except for the few out there, but even those cost an arm and a leg to upgrade.

BTW, that will handle WoW and TF2 more than well. I've played HL2, Portal, and Lost Coast at full graphic settings and have gotten good FPS on this under-clocked card. I get around 20 FPS in WoW with everything turned up.

 

As was just mentioned in another thread about the 8600M GT 512MB, there's really not much point in going for that card because the 8600M GT is so limited due to the 128-bit memory bus that it can't really take advantage of much more than 256mb of vram. It's bottlenecked.

 

cache is a good thing, but in the end, a speed bump on a processor always ends up making more of a difference. therefore: if 2.4 to 2.5ghz isn't enough to lure you to upgrade, don't let the added cache swing you over. It will be less of a difference going from 3 to 6 megs of cache than from 2.4 to 2.5 ghz, if the cache's were the same. Of course, the 2.4 to 2.5 bump includes the clock speed and cache, but its just not that big of a deal. You would probably never see a difference in games, because your gpu is going to be the bottleneck. as far as normal office things, you'll never see a difference.

faster processors are useful for things like batch encoding, where you have sets of things to encode in high quality with precision checking... it can take a long long time. even a slightly faster processor can reduce the total time by a significant amount.

 

He will be doing slight video editing in iMovie (nothing pro but he has an HDD Sony camera) and some Photoshoping/web development and Word/Office type apps as well.

Will any of those benefit from the 2.5 / 6MB L2 over the lower end model? Thanks for the replies btw!

 

Performance will of course be a little faster with a higher clock speed and more L2 but unless what he is doing is really maxing out the CPU then he shouldn't even notice a difference in use. A better upgrade would be 4 gigs of RAM and a 7200rpm hard drive vs the CPU upgrade.

 

Not really. The difference between the old celerons and the p4's was cache, and the p4's were MUCH faster at the same clock speed.
Cache makes a big difference in the processor power. But it's also expensive, and what separates the Intel Extremes from the normal processors. I don't see much of a way to do a direct comparison, but I would have to say that an increase of cache is much more important than a tiny 200 mhz increase in clock speed. But as you say as well, there a lack of data to really show the difference on these current models. Even if we were to look at the boost of 200mhz vs. doubling the cache it would still not be a huge difference, hardly noticeable. Maybe if he was doing rendering which took days, yeah, but otherwise it would be very minute.

And yeah, his bottle neck would most certainly be his GPU.

 

Added performance from more cache is going to be dependent a lot on the application you're running. Most applications are programmed on systems with CPU's that don't have large amounts of cache so they may or may not run that much faster with a lot more cache. It's sort of like the single threaded vs multi threaded thing with single and multi core processors except a little different in function. I saw some benches comparing the T8300 to the T9300 in several tests including gaming and it did look like the T9300 was marginally faster across the board and had a pretty good lead in a few tests but the benchmarks looked somewhat screwed up to me. They weren't consistent at all and at times the T9300 was outperforming the T9500.

 

From what I've read sometime ago Apple has different clocks set for the 15" and 17" MBP (same card), so there might be a difference between the 512MB and 256MB 8600M GT (besides the RAM).

 

Except that in the case of cache, programs don't have to be written to explicitly take advantage of it like they did with multi-threading. Not every program needs a heavy amount of cache, but overall, you would see more benefits of doubling the cache vs. increasing your clock speed by less than 5%. But yeah, some benchmarks having more processor power is better, but for most everyday users, I don' think the benefits would come from just an increase of processor power.

BTW, do you know of any benchmarks out there showing these two processors directly compared? I have yet to find any. Would be good to see the exact differences.

 

NotebookCheck has a fair comparison between these new Penryns.

 

Hrm... they need fewer synth benchmarks. useless those are.

I'm surprised by how well Merom keeps up with it.

 

1st of- we aren't dealing with celeron or pentium 4 processors here.
2nd- the celerons specifically were crippled p4's. they had like 128k of cache available vs 512k. now we are dealing with the difference between 3 and 6 megs. the base line is pretty high, and doubling it isn't going to increase performance that much. it just won't. a 2.6ghz penryn w/ 3 megs of cache would be faster than a 2.4ghz penryn with 6. period.
3rd- either way, i think we can agree the total speed bump is minimal enough to not justify the cost of the upgrade for general usage (even for a power user)