[vertigociel]

I'm a current high school senior who is planning on buying a MacBook Pro for college - but I'm not sure whether to go for the low end 15 inch model, or the high end one. I'd load the low end model with 2 Gb of RAM, so the only differences would be the 170 MHz clock speed and 128 Mb of VRAM. What I want to know is how much of a performance difference there would be between the two of them on graphics-creation applications, specifically in Photoshop CS, Painter IX.5, Flash 8 Professional, and Blender (An excellent open-source 3d modeling software, see blender.org). I haven't been able to find any benchmarks pitting the high end MBP 15" against the low end - obviously this is not an interesting enough question for most people. The performance difference of each individually probably wouldn't be much, but I usually have two or three of those applications open at a time, along with Adium, Clutter, iTunes, Camino, BOINC, the usual, and my current iMac G5 rev. A gets really unresponsive under these conditions.

[jdrumstik]

I wouldn't really worry about the CPU Clock speed, however the extra Video Ram might be needed. Hard to say, for sure though you will want 2GB of system ram.

If it makes any difference, I can play pretty much any video game on almost high settings with the 400/400 128MB X1600M

[bloodline]

Even the low end MBP is much much much much much faster than the G5 iMac you have... so don't really worry about it, if you can't afford the 2.33GHz jobbie then go woth the 2.16GHz you will still be very happy.