2.4ghz or 2.5ghz?? A little help

Just curious, for mainly photoshop graphic design work and maybe a little bit of dabbling in video editing in my spare time (nothing too heavy), would I really notice much of a difference between a macbook Pro with a 2.4ghz 3mb L2 cache processor and one with a 2.5ghz 6mb L2 cache processor? With a price difference of almost $1000 I'm just wondering if it's justified.

 

$1,000?!? No, it's not justified. I assume the two processors are the T8300 and the T9300? There should only be a $90 - $100 difference (more than worth it for the added cache). If it is a choice between the T8300 and T9300, I would call Apple up, call shenanigans, and ask them if they would be willing to give you a price that is closer to reality for the T9300 (e.g., $100 - $150...$150 to account for the markup they give to anything that bears the Apple name). If they aren't, stick with the T8300.

 

Um... you're not really looking at this right.

The price difference is $500 and you're gaining more memory on the video card as well as a larger HDD.

 

Sorry, I may have exagerated slightly It's a difference of $700 Australian dollars between the base model and high end 15inch. I'm not too concerned with the difference in hard drive space as I'll be getting an external drive to switch between laptop and work computer and the 512 mb graphics card I've been told is only any good if I intend to play games on it (which I don't) so I'm curious about the cpu.

 

I run CS3 very well with 2.4 GHz C2D. I don't think you'd even notice any difference. However I have 4mb cache...

 

You will see a very marginal difference between the two CPU's. The extra cache is nice but only having an increase of 100 mhz is fairly 'meh'.
I'd probably go with the cheaper one and pop in 4 gigs of ram.

*edit*

Arquis is right, you really wouldnt' notice a difference. You'd have to have some long processes going on and time them to really see a difference.

 

Exactly what I was thinking of doing hollownail. Even with bumping up the RAM I still save money on the difference between the base model and high end model.

 

do yourself a favour and buy RAM elsewhere. Apple charges you 5-10 times the price.

 

Mind you, 8600GT can't utilise all 512mb of Vram anyway. Because of the 128-bit bus.

 

The upgrades in the higher-end 15.4" definitely aren't worth $500. Hard drives can be bought and upgraded for less yourself, the 8600M GT 512MB really doesn't provide any major benefit over the 256MB version because of being bottlenecked by a 128-bit bus, and while the T9300 is a nice little upgrade it's not worth more than $100 to gain. You're unlikely to notice any difference between the T8300 and T9300 no matter what you're doing unless you're doing something like heavy encoding where it takes a long period of time to complete the task.

 

The 1999 version is perfect for the price.