[jriveractu]

Hey people, I'm an architecture student and I need to run AutoCAD, Photoshop, and other similar design/3d apps (sometimes more than one at the same time) . Now, I've been told that Boot Camp will work best for me, but should I get the 2.2 GHz Macbook Pro or spend a bit more on the 2.4 GHz ? Besides that and the hard drive, the only other difference is the video card (128 MB vs. 256 MB) . Do you think the 2.2 will run smoothly enough ?

Thanks in advance !

[Mojo]

BareFeats compares the 2.2 and 2.4 Ghz MBPs and the 128MB and 256MB cards:

MacBook Pro "Santa Rosa" - 128M vs 256M VRAM

MacBook Pro "Santa Rosa" - CPU crunching

Bottom line: there is little difference in performance. I'd say that there are better things to spend the extra $500 on, like a portable external drive for easy backups and in case the internal drive dies, which they tend to do sooner or later. An external drive can save your bacon if you depend on your computer for school/work.

[ricacu]

You should consider buying a Windows based computer for those "Architectural" tasks.

j.k.
allready told you

-ricacu

[VuONG]

hello fellow architect. i am using auto 2008 with my macbook pro 2.4 ghz 15" it works ultra smooth just as smooth as my friends high end windows laptop. I just ran today 30 high res photoshop lay outs at once while playing itunes and surfing the web.

i heard that rhino might run a little laggy because macs usually have problems doing 3d example 3d games, apples run a little slow but not horrible. One of the best invested ive made.

If it helps you decide, i did the exact same task on my sis black macbook and i only felt lag when i did extremely large hatching

[VuONG]

a couple of my friends ran autocad on parallel too and it work just as smooth just switch to bootcamp when doing 3d rendering

[wubrew]

I chose a 2.2 over 2.4. Running window base Adobe Photoshop with out any hitch. Use the money saved for 4GB ram upgrade.

[jriveractu]

Thank you all, I'm going with the 2.2 model (and yes (^), I'll spend the money on ram instead)

Now I'm just waiting for them to be in-stock where I live ...