Macbook Air: Sandy bridge or Nvidia?

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benny2008

14 posts

Geek

#95866 15-Jan-2012 09:26

Hi i need some expert advice from you. I plan to buy a macbook air 13'. The reason i choose MBA instead of MBP is the small size and the SSD. I did some reasearch SSD seems to make the performance of photo editing activities very swift despite the Intel graphic card.

I have found two 13' models with similiar price (~$1850) and both are near new. One is Core2 dual with Nvidia 320M & 256GB SSD. The other one is the latest 13' model i5 sandy bridge, Intel grpahic card 3000 & 128GB SSD.

My main activities are photoshop lightroom (my photo lib=55GB), MS office work, internet and minimal gaming (Only play Civilization 4).

Do you think it's woth to go for a better graphic card and 256GB SSD with a less powerful CPU?

macuser

2120 posts

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#569006 15-Jan-2012 09:43

You're better off with Sandy Bridge, much much faster than the C2D, GPU doesn't play a big role at all with PS, it lets you manipulate a bit smoother but I don't think the NVIDIA card will actually perform many calculations. Also the Sandy Bridge MBA's have a thunderbolt port, which will be useful in the future as you will be able to get external GPU's and drives. Future proof.

benny2008

14 posts

Geek

#569018 15-Jan-2012 10:30

macuser: You're better off with Sandy Bridge, much much faster than the C2D, GPU doesn't play a big role at all with PS, it lets you manipulate a bit smoother but I don't think the NVIDIA card will actually perform many calculations. ?Also the Sandy Bridge MBA's have a thunderbolt port, which will be useful in the future as you will be able to get external GPU's and drives. ?Future proof.

Yeah thunderbolt tech sounds promising. Looks like 128GB SSD will be filled fairly quickly as i'm shooting a lot of photos. Apple doesn't allow upgrade to 256Gb for some strange reasons. So i have to think about external HD. If i store all my cateloges on an external HD would that dramatically slow down lightroom performance as compared to editing files on local SSD? (thunderbolt HD is the only solution but stil very pricey atm)

RunningMan

9326 posts

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#569026 15-Jan-2012 11:02

benny2008:
Yeah thunderbolt tech sounds promising. Looks like 128GB SSD will be filled fairly quickly as i'm shooting a lot of photos. Apple doesn't allow upgrade to 256Gb for some strange reasons.

You can get the 256GB version from the Apple Store.

benny2008

14 posts

Geek

#569070 15-Jan-2012 13:32

The 256GB SSD sounds like the perfect choice. I have a Firewire 800 2x1GB external HD in raid 1. I still wana continue using it but MBA diesn't support Firewire 800. Is there any adaptor that allow Firewire to thunderbolt conversion? I probably will wait untill thunderbolt HD price to go down before i get one.