[weikee]

Hey, need some advice

am thinking about putting some hard earned cash down for a new laptop which could stomach some motion/3d/video work as well.. My current network setup is a beefed up packard bell pc desktop workstation with dual monitors, minimac and a vaio. The vaio is not brilliant for any work with after effects or 3d however, at least not beyond basic things - which is kinda annoying as its got 1 gb of ram and 2ghz..

So am basically looking at a heftier laptop performance wise so I can keyframe and animate from the loo, caff, beach or wherever.

Any experiences in using the new macbook pro for more intense projects you'd like to share would be most appreciated.. value for money?

Looking at this configuration for a 15" macbook pro, maybe with a juiced up HD..

* 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
* 1440 x 900 pixels
* 2GB memory
* 120GB hard drive1
* 6x double-layer SuperDrive
* ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics with 256MB SDRAM

[christianz]

Hi !

I use a MacBook Pro of the first generation with Cinema4D R10 and I am happy with it. You can attach an external firewire drive, but on my model there is no FW800 port. This might be a concern if you do a lot of video work, but for rendering with intel-native applications such as Cinema4D it is very good. I would recommend now to take the laptop with the option to upgrade to 3Giga RAM.

Here a Cinebench benchmark:
CINEBENCH 9.5
****************************************************
Machine Name: MacBook Pro 15"
Machine Model: MacBookPro1,1
CPU Type: Intel Core Duo
Number Of Cores: 2
CPU Speed: 2 GHz
L2 Cache (shared): 2 MB
Memory: 1 GB
Bus Speed: 667 MHz

Operating System : OSX10.4.6.

Graphics Card :
Chipset Model: ATY,RadeonX1600
Type: Display
Bus: PCIe
VRAM (Total): 256 MB
Vendor: ATI (0x1002)
Device ID: 0x71c5
Revision ID: 0x0000
EFI Driver Version: 01.00.068
Displays:
Color LCD:
Display Type: LCD
Resolution: 1440 x 900
Depth: 32-bit Color

****************************************************

Rendering (Single CPU): 305 CB-CPU
Rendering (Multiple CPU): 573 CB-CPU

Multiprocessor Speedup: 1.88

Shading (CINEMA 4D) : 349 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Software Lighting) : 1290 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Hardware Lighting) : 2108 CB-GFX

OpenGL Speedup: 6.04

****************************************************