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    MB vs MBP for Flow Jo and Prism

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by phaet2112, May 21, 2008.

  1. phaet2112

    phaet2112 Notebook Enthusiast

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    I am deciding between the 2.4 ghz MB and the 15.4" 2.4 ghz MBP for $600 more. This is for specific scientific apps including lots of computational analysis of data plots (> 1gb of data being analyzed at a time) and stats, along with general use. This is upgrading from a G3 iBook that bit it.

    Anyone here use a new core 2 duo MB or a MBP with Flow Jo or Cellquest?
    I can't really see much of a benefit of the MBP besides the screen size and the video card to justify the extra cost.

    What is the general consensus?
     
    phaet2112, May 21, 2008
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  2. mc511

    mc511 Notebook Evangelist

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    Unless you need the video card or you need the bigger screen yeah i would go with the macbook pro. But the macbook will be good to. It can hold the same amount of memory. Up to 4 gigs.
     
    mc511, May 22, 2008
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  3. Underpantman

    Underpantman Notebook Virtuoso

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    I run cellquestpro (offline) and prism 5 no prob's on my macbook. I only have 2gb of ram but have never really run into any issues with those programs... they are far from gpu heavy, and the c2duo is more than enough to run both easily.
    I went with the mb over the mbp, mainly for portability and price, I just couldn't justify the extra cost, and I am really glad that I did. The mb has been my best tech buy in years. I will probably buy a nice big external monitor for work soon, thereby eliminating the smaller screen issue.
    a
    :)
    ps are you an immunologist or cell biologist?
     
    Underpantman, May 22, 2008
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  4. phaet2112

    phaet2112 Notebook Enthusiast

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    Immunologist analyzing FCS files of adaptive and innate immune infiltrating cells with 2.5 million events per sample, averaging about 20 samples per experiment, so those files previously choked the old iBook.

    How do you like Prism? Have you done analysis of similarly large files with it?
     
    phaet2112, May 23, 2008
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  5. Underpantman

    Underpantman Notebook Virtuoso

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    Well unfortunately I'm just a lowly cell biologist/cell cyclist looking at around 50-100 thousand events/sample. That said Cellquest ran those without a blink, and again its just 2-D files so the added gpu power on the mbp will do nothing to speed up the process. You'd be better off swinging for more RAM and a bigger faster hard drive for a mb. But then I might be biased.
    Prism is not to bad, I only just started using it, as I needed to do some graphs for a paper that were beyond excel's ability. The built in stat's are also nice, and it walks you thru most of it, so I found it pretty easy to jump straight in and get the results I needed without spending time figuring out how to use it.
    a
    :)
     
    Underpantman, May 23, 2008
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