CPU & RAM differences....

For some of the Mac Notebooks, Im guessing the main reason for the price differences is the CPU and the RAM...

Is there a noticable difference for

2.4GHz
2.66GHz
2.93Ghz

And what about RAM?

2GB
4GB

Please advice. I do not have any experience with Macs so I do not really know what to look for when buying them.
Thank You

 

em,I guess you are comparing macbook pro configurations?

 

Yeah, because the rest of the options are the same for the most part. These are the only two parts where its really customizable...

 

What will you use his macbook for?
If you do just the basic stuff on your computer (surf the web, word processing, etc) I don't think you'd see much of a performance increase from those three different CPUs.

4BG of RAM is a nice upgrade, but I'd never buy more RAM from them. It's very easy to upgrade RAM yourself and will be cheaper than what Apple would charge you. You're better off just getting the 2GB of RAM and buying an upgrade yourself later if you feel it is necessary.
Just my opinion.

 

yeap,and the size of GPU and HDD memory.

 

I have read that the gpu cannot access more than 256mb of vram because it's only a 128 bit card. Concerning the hard disk, i would suggest going from 5400 to 7200rpm because that's where the true difference in speed lies. I got myself a 4gb kit, upgrading from 2gb to 4gb. I haven't really seen a big difference in speed. But I can say that running my virtual machine no longer makes my computer lag when my ram is increased.

 

It's not that it can't access (address) the memory, it's just that the 128 bit wide bus greatly limits the speed in which data can travel back and forth between the GPU and its memory. Sure you can have 1GB of vram, but its pointless to put a bunch of data in this ram if it will take ages to access. With a narrow bus, you would want to be dealing with smaller sets of data that won't clog the bus (and need less memory to store). So in practice, having a ton of memory is pretty useless if much of the memory isn't actually used. More memory also costs more, and to cut costs, many manufacturers will use slower vram in order to have more vram (exacerbating the whole 128 bit bus issue as bandwidth is a function of width of the bus times the speed of the memory). Many manufactures do this as it's lot easier to market size than speed. How many hard drives do you know that advertise themselves as 1 terabyte in capacity versus having 6 ms random seek time?


To answer the OP, get the baseline model. If you do a lot of multi-tasking or run virtual machines, get 4GB of ddr2 667 memory from newegg for ~$30. It takes just a minute and a screwdriver to do the upgrade yourself. I recently upgraded my MBP to 4GB and to be honest, I havn't noticed a speed improvement. OSX doesn't require a ton of memory like Windows Vista. OSX will run just fine with 1GB of memory and 2GB is already overkill for general tasks. As far as the processor, most users won't notice the difference in processor speeds. Most of the time, the processor will run underclocked anyway to save battery life.

 

The new MB's and MBP's only accept 1066MHz DDR3 RAM, if that's what you're referring to.

 

Oh yeah ... I knew that!

So yeah, just ignore that ddr2 part of my post

 

And the MHz-part