<p>Can someone break down for me which would be a better investment to upgrade?</p>
<p>I'm trying to decide between two different MacBook Pro's.</p>
<p>2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
8GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x4GB</p>
<p>or</p>
<p>3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x2GB</p>
<p>What's going to be the difference?</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>What are you going to use this computer for? I can’t imagine a college student would need a 3.06 GHz, 8 GB machine. </p>
<p>Anyways, don’t buy the extra RAM from apple. They always overcharge for RAM, in this case they charge $1000…insane. Get the 3.06 GHz machine, and you can upgrade the RAM yourself when the price goes down.</p>
<p>Honestly, 2.53 / 4 is more than enough for college needs.</p>
<p>Unless you’ll be running an excess of engineering software or videogames. Save the money and spend it on something you’ll use.</p>
<p>Mac OSX is optimized to run pretty efficiently so 8 GB is extreme overkill. More than likely, you’ll be using no more than 2-3 gigs of RAM at any given time. The speed of the RAM itself is probably the more important aspect…in this case, laptop DDR3 is standardized at 1066 MHz, which is great. Go with the 4GB option. As for the processor, differences in speed are really quite pointless. Rather, the size of the L2 cache is more directly correlated with increased performance. Apple standardizes the L2 cache size at 3 MB up through the 2.66 GHz CPU. The 2.8 GHz and 3.06 GHz processors both offer a 6MB L2 cache, but at a significant price premium. I’d advise you stick with the 2.53 GHz processor in your case.</p>
<p>Even though they are overkill, the 3.00+ processor is a better deal. RAM is cheap to upgrade (and 4 gb is more than enough anyways), and the CPU is more important IMO</p>
<p>Processor! I doubt if you’ll need more than 4 gigs of RAM, but that extra processing power could be handy.</p>
<p>Get the better processor. 4 GB is more than enough for most uses. You can upgrade memory later, but you can’t upgrade the processor.</p>
<p>What are you going to do with this computer? If you are going to be typing papers and browsing the internet, you’ll be wasting a lot of money . . . get the cheaper one.</p>
<p>For students running regular applications, you can find other laptops that look as great and perform just as well and cheaper than a mac. If you are running high performance programs (for engineering, architechture, etc.), then I suggest the 3.06 Ghz.</p>
<p>buy a really expensive Thinkpad, get the reimbursement, and then return it and buy a MacBook Pro</p>
<p>speaking purely in terms of which will make more of a difference, the processor wins out. this doesn’t account for price or whether it’ll come in handy as others have mentioned.</p>
<p>I ll go with the processor. U can kill time a good processer. Memory u can buy. Wal mart is selling 60 gb hard drive with a netbook and printer for 500 or something like that</p>
<p>In the long run, it would be a better buy if you go for the one with the better processor, simply because upgrading RAM is a relatively simple procedure (at least when compared to upgrading the processor of a laptop…), and the price of RAM is pretty affordable nowadays.</p>