[Halfloaf]

Hi,

I'm thinking of dumping (or donating to my GF) my old 1Ghz Tibook with 768mb RAM and 60gig 7200 Hitachi drive and buying a 2ghz Whitebook with at least a gig of Ram and 7200 rpm HD.

My question really is, what am I looking at in terms of speed difference between the Macbooks GMA 950 vs. Tibooks 64mb ATI Mobility 9000? I'm worried about OpenGL performance in programs like SketchUp and Vectorwaorks. I don't play games, except DOSBox stuff and ScummVM. (Old point-and-click classics)

And nope, I canno afford a MB Pro.

Any educated guesses?

Thanks!

[tricha6]

Are you converting vector drawings into 3D? 2D operations should be fine on a Macbook; where the GMA 950 really fails is shading objects to make them look 3D; this is something games and some apps do a lot AND dump to the graphics card.

If you aren't working with 3D or the programs you use aren't written to dump that kind of work onto the Graphics card - then your main concern will be whether your apps are universal binary or not.

Quite frankly, despite what Apple says in their benchmarks and the gushing over the speed of intel on message boards, I haven't found my Macbook to be soooo much faster than my 1.5ghz Powerbook G4 (and I have 2GB of RAM in my MB vs. 1.5GB that I had in my Powerbook).

[mathew_m]

Originally Posted by tricha6

Quite frankly, despite what Apple says in their benchmarks and the gushing over the speed of intel on message boards, I haven't found my Macbook to be soooo much faster than my 1.5ghz Powerbook G4 (and I have 2GB of RAM in my MB vs. 1.5GB that I had in my Powerbook).

That's because you're probably using photoshop which isn't universal. Try playing back some HD content in quicktime and then tell me if you don't see a difference in speed. The G4 will choke.

[k squared]

I'm using SketchUp (Free) in Windows XP (MB 2.0) and it runs great...much faster/smoother than on my PB 12" 1.33 MHz.

I do not believe VW is Universal yet so it will probably be similar speed wise to your PB. I have a student version of VW 10 around here somewhere....I can try installing it and see how it performs.

[Halfloaf]

Originally Posted by k squared

I'm using SketchUp (Free) in Windows XP (MB 2.0) and it runs great...much faster/smoother than on my PB 12" 1.33 MHz.

I do not believe VW is Universal yet so it will probably be similar speed wise to your PB. I have a student version of VW 10 around here somewhere....I can try installing it and see how it performs.

K squared,

Thanks, just what I wanted to know. I use the Pro version of SketchUp and if the MB is faster than your 12" PB then it will most certainly be faster than my 1Ghz tibook.

I have VW 11 but there isn't much diff between 10 and 11 speedwise. I'll pro'lly end up using ACAD in XP anyhow.

Thanks!

-HL