Help a photographer / Macbook Pro Decision

[godwinaustin]

Hi everyone.

Time to upgrade.

I need to decide between the new 13 rMBP haswell (1499) or the older 15 rMBP ivy Bridge (1699).

the 15 is quad core with the nvidia dedicated graphics

the 13 with the dual core and iris 5100

both have 8GB Ram with 256GB HDD

I run lightroom and photoshop on a regular basis with large file exports and batch processing of RAW files.

Which system would you recommend? Is the new technology in the haswell 13 worth it in real world/practical terms?

Thank you.

 

[Kaido]

Will you be working primarily on the laptop? If so, I'd lean toward the larger screen + more physical cores.

 

[JAG87]

For heavy photoshop use, I would get the 15" 2012, no doubt about it. More cores, better graphics (better OpenCL performance), a larger screen and a slightly larger resolution (more screen real estate).

The only time you need to concern yourself with the 13" is if you care about portability. Otherwise the 15" (even last year's model) is obviously a more powerful machine.

And no, the new tech in this year's model (802.11ac, TB2) is not worth sacrificing the performance of the 15".

 

[godwinaustin]

Will you be working primarily on the laptop? If so, I'd lean toward the larger screen + more physical cores.

yes, this will be my only machine.

 

[godwinaustin]

For heavy photoshop use, I would get the 15" 2012, no doubt about it. More cores, better graphics (better OpenCL performance), a larger screen and a slightly larger resolution (more screen real estate).

The only time you need to concern yourself with the 13" is if you care about portability. Otherwise the 15" (even last year's model) is obviously a more powerful machine.

And no, the new tech in this year's model (802.11ac, TB2) is not worth sacrificing the performance of the 15".

And I guess thats a big part of my question, does lightroom/photoshop really make use of multiple cores and dedicated graphics?

 

[Eug]

http://www.michaeldeleon.net/macbook-pro-2012-vs-2009-lightroom-4-benchmarks/

The i7 in that graph is quad.

 

[godwinaustin]

interesting, more than twice as fast there, but those are different generations of processors correct?

 

[Eug]

Yes. I'm just pointing out that these apps are very heavily dependent on CPU speed.

Aperture for example uses the GPU, but IIRC having a good CPU is even more important.

 

[JAG87]

And I guess thats a big part of my question, does lightroom/photoshop really make use of multiple cores and dedicated graphics?

You better believe it... heres first thing I pulled out of google

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/photoshop-cs6-gimp-aftershot-pro,3208-13.html

Results are on AMD, but they carry through to Intel and NV. 8 core vs 4 core makes a huge difference, and enabling openCL obviously makes another huge difference. Now that openCL runs on Intel as well, the difference between the two is not so bad, but the GT650m should still produce better results because it is still somewhat faster than the HD5100, and it offers much better openGL performance.

 

[Sunrise089]

Commenting on the graph, the newer hardware is obviously much faster, but Sandy/Ivy is also way fast clock for clock than Penryn. Clocks are lower at base but probably higher when turboing. So I think it's hard to separate the cores vs. architecture benefits from that graph alone.

 

[JAG87]

Commenting on the graph, the newer hardware is obviously much faster, but Sandy/Ivy is also way fast clock for clock than Penryn. Clocks are lower at base but probably higher when turboing. So I think it's hard to separate the cores vs. architecture benefits from that graph alone.

Surely you can't attribute almost 3x fold performance increase that the FX-8150 shows against the A8-3850 due to differences in IPC and clocks... it's the thread count that matters.

 

[godwinaustin]

are there any real-worl advantages to the new PCIe or wireless AC features? I will most certainly be operating multiple external SSDs for storage and backup.

 

[Eug]

802.11ac is a big real world advantage… if you use WiFi for large amounts of files. However, in your case I'd hope you're using USB 3 or Thunderbolt for that.

Think of 802.11ac as a replacement to wired Ethernet, much slower than Gigabit Ethernet but potentially much faster than 100 Mbps Ethernet, for the times you're too lazy to plug it in.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/0...e-than-doubles-802-11ac-file-transfer-speeds/

Note that in Mavericks 10.9, Apple has re-implemented SMB using SMB2. Dunno what the real-world speeds are. The reviews out there are too focused on CPU and GPU speed so far.

 

[godwinaustin]

802.11ac is a big real world advantage… if you use WiFi for large amounts of files. However, in your case I'd hope you're using USB 3 or Thunderbolt for that.

Think of 802.11ac as a replacement to wired Ethernet, much slower than Gigabit Ethernet but potentially much faster than 100 Mbps Ethernet, for the times you're too lazy to plug it in.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/0...e-than-doubles-802-11ac-file-transfer-speeds/

Note that in Mavericks 10.9, Apple has re-implemented SMB using SMB2. Dunno what the real-world speeds are. The reviews out there are too focused on CPU and GPU speed so far.

Thanks everyone for the help