Need advice on buying my new Macbook Pro

[Cyrax89]

Hey all,

So I am looking into the Macbook Pro line of laptops and I want to know which is best for what I do.

I do gaming, typically Warcraft 3, Left 4 Dead, and Company of Heroes.

Lots of music storage

and college work.

Do I really need to upgrade to the geforce 9600? Or is the 9400 sufficient for these games? Please advice. Thanks!

[notabadname]

If you know you are going to be gaming, then I would certainly want the 9600. I don't fully understand all of the inner workings yet, but the coming Snow Leopard and OpenCL will put your graphics chip to work to speed along non-graphics tasks also. So having a faster graphics card, should, in the future, provide better overall performance for other Apps also. To quote Apple:

With graphics processors surpassing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL in Snow Leopard is a technology that makes it possible for developers to tap the vast computing power currently in the graphics processor and use it for any application.

You will also improve the resale of the computer down the road, and "future proof" your Mac (OK, no such thing, but you will certainly extend its compatibility with future games and software). So in my opinion, if it is reasonably affordable, I would upgrade my graphics card. In this case it is a very good value. Your processor goes from 2.53GHz to 2.66GHz, the Hard drive jumps from 250GB to 320GB (I am already tight on drive space on my 250GB) and you get the additional 9600M GT, all for $300.

But wait, there's more . . . . Sorry, couldn't resist, just felt like I was doing one of those infomercials

[notabadname]

PS: Thanks for stopping by theAppleblog forums Cyrax89, hope to see more of you here!