How much will I benefit from a Penryn vs non-Penryn MacBook Pro?

February 28, 2008 6:18 PM

Now that the new MacBook Pros are out, I need to decide between buying a new one or getting one of the models they were selling a week ago for $600 less. Given that I'm a video editor/compositor, is a Penryn processor and 512MB of VRAM (vs 256) worth the extra cash?

For standard benchmarks, it looks like the Penryn MBPs aren't significantly faster than the last model, but I've read that they'll provide a 40% speed increase for applications that leverage the SSE4 instruction set. (Knowing the phrase "SSE4" is about as deep as my knowledge of hardware goes, incidentally.) Is it likely that Final Cut Pro, After Effects, and other video apps will be taking advantage of Penryn? And is SSE4 going to be so widespread that not having it will cause my computer to become obsolete faster? (Much as the switch to Intel was for my PowerMac G5.)

Secondly: I primarily work in Final Cut, After Effects, and Motion -- how much and what type of a performance increase am I likely to see from the additional 256 MB of video RAM? Will I be able to composite more effects in real-time without rendering, or is that related to GPU speed rather than VRAM? Or, say I were pushing live video and mixing effects through the card in a VJ set -- given that both computers carry the same model of video card, what difference would the extra VRAM make in my ability?

Thanks!

posted by tweebiscuit to computers & internet (10 comments total)

My suggestion: save gobs of cash by going for the smaller screen. Then, just hook up the laptop to a larger screen. As someone who works in video, etc. you must have one or two already. Having your primary macbook screen at 13" vs 15" is not that big of a deal IMO, but I guess it might be different for someone in your industry.
posted by Deathalicious at 7:06 PM on February 28, 2008

Whoops. Nevermind. I missed the "Pro" bit, and they start at 15" anyway...
posted by Deathalicious at 7:12 PM on February 28, 2008

Deathalicious, tweebiscuit is a user of pro video apps, and a Macbook lacks a dedicated graphics card. Bad buying advice there.

I'm not much into video, and I'm not much a pro user either, but I'm typing this on a refurbished 2.4 GHz MBP I bought last month and tricked out with 4 GB of RAM from Crucial. I was orginally looking at a new black Macbook that I was planning to upgrade (through Apple) with a larger hard drive than last month's stock hard drive on the black model. I ended up finding a better deal on this refurbished Macbook Pro. That is, it cost me several hundred dollars less to buy a used top-of-the-line 15-inch MBP than a new top-of-the-line Macbook.

Unless you absolutely must have a brand-new Mac, my advice is check out the deals on refurbished Macs on the Apple Store site.
posted by emelenjr at 7:21 PM on February 28, 2008

FWIW, the new ones run cooler.
posted by puritycontrol at 7:23 PM on February 28, 2008

emelenjr -- I don't think there are any refurbs of the brand new units yet, since they just came out, and I'd rather have last week's model new when refurbished is only a few hundred bucks cheaper -- the clearance rate is already a great deal.

To be specific, though, I'm not looking for buying advice as much as I'm trying to get an idea of the real-world impact of the difference between the two models, given my usage.
posted by tweebiscuit at 7:58 PM on February 28, 2008

This type of question comes up a lot, usually in the form of: should I get the computer that's being sold now, or wait until the next model that's marginally better. Usually a fear of obsolescence is stated.

To this question I always say: buy now. Your computer will be abundantly useful for years. I just traded up from a Powerbook that was 7 years old and didn't start to seem sluggish on web browsing until a few months ago.
posted by neuron at 9:19 PM on February 28, 2008

No. For full effect, Penryn requires the Montevina motherboard chipset and bus. The main advantage of Penryn in a Santa Rosa setup is merely less power used and less heat generated per cycle.

A friend's take. He's right.
posted by ikkyu2 at 9:41 PM on February 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

ikkyu2's right: Penryn is all about the smaller-fab process, which for a laptop means less heat, less battery consumption per cycle, and, I suppose, a smaller die size. That's it. You can't use DDR3 memory with the laptop chipset (...yet--even though the processor supports it), so there goes that potential performance enhancer. Basically, you're looking at top-of-the-line parts for top-of-the-line prices for an extra 0.1 Ghz in processing speed.

No, it's not worth it.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 1:04 AM on February 29, 2008

Save your pennies by buying the slightly older model. Use the extra to (a) insert a bigger HDD, ~$115 or so and (b) max the system RAM. The Santa Rosa MBP I'm using does get warm when it's going full steam, but unless it's sitting directly on your lap it's not really an issue.
posted by caution live frogs at 6:50 AM on February 29, 2008

As a video editor who just bought the 2.4 refurbished yesterday, I know I felt comfortable enough to. With the money I'm saving, I can get a nice second screen for my desktop and a new microphone.
On a related note, I went to the mac store a few weeks ago and was look at one of the new 8 processor pac pros and started throwing stuff around in final cut (multiple tracks, reverse speed, time remapping, etc) and I was surprised at how slow I felt it ran. We use quads at work and I certainly didn't feel like it was an impressive jump when I was fooling around on the 8. With benchmarks saying that it actually runs slower, don't waste the loot on the newest crazy one.
posted by history is a weapon at 9:28 AM on February 29, 2008