lightningflash
New Member
This summer, I'm planning on buying a new laptop for college, and am considering the Macbook Pro with Retina Display. I will likely be attending Princetion University or the California Institute of Technology for a major in Physics and a minor in Computer Science. I plan to be engaged heavily in undergraduate research, so I will probably be using programs such as MATLAB and Mathematica during my studies, and will be using it for some medium-to-light gaming (mostly Minecraft and games like Portal).
My question is this: should I spend the extra three hundred dollars to buy the 2.7 GHz model, or just buy the 2.4 GHz version with the 512 GB storage upgrade? I wouldn't imagine that the processor boost would affect gaming performance very much, but would the additional speed and extra 8 GB of RAM significantly speed up my computing work for higher-level classes and research? For reference, here are the cpubenchmark pages for the respective processors:
2.4:http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-3635QM+%40+2.40GHz
2.7 GHz: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-3740QM+%40+2.70GHz
P.S. I am merely looking for a comparison of the processors, not a Mac v. PC flame war. Keep this on topic, please.
My question is this: should I spend the extra three hundred dollars to buy the 2.7 GHz model, or just buy the 2.4 GHz version with the 512 GB storage upgrade? I wouldn't imagine that the processor boost would affect gaming performance very much, but would the additional speed and extra 8 GB of RAM significantly speed up my computing work for higher-level classes and research? For reference, here are the cpubenchmark pages for the respective processors:
2.4:http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-3635QM+%40+2.40GHz
2.7 GHz: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-3740QM+%40+2.70GHz
P.S. I am merely looking for a comparison of the processors, not a Mac v. PC flame war. Keep this on topic, please.