MBP 2.2 i7 2011 vs DELL Precision M6600 2.2 i7 for Photoshop/Premiere

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den59

Well-known member
Dear All,

I'm about to buy a new notebook which I should use next 3-4 years.
What I basically do is:

1) retouching in Photoshop (that could be some 100MP files scanned from 6x7cm medium format positives/negatives)
2) editing AVCHD

I'm thinking between MBP 2011 15'' 2.2 and Dell Precision M6600.

DEll: 2.2 i7 / 8Gb 1333MHz / 2 Gb Nvidia 3000M / anti-glare 1920x1080 17''
MBP: 2.2 i7 / 4Gb 1333Mhz / 1 GB ATI HD 6750M / anti-glare 1600x... 15''

I was working on hakintosh for one year (desktop PC, 2.6Mhz i7,GTX260,6GB,...) and I love OS-X. But I travel a lot and so i need some mobile option.

Now, with that CS5.5 and MPE which supports only NVidia GPU with CUDA, I don't really know what to buy. If only MBP would be with NVidia Quadra and new i7 processor, and with Thunderbolt, I would go for it. But considering that I would like to use that notebook for as long as possible, and I don't plan to go for 2K/4K editing anyway, especially on notebook, I really would like to have the best value for the money.

If for editing I can still choose between FCP and Premiere and hope that FCP X will be able to handle AVCHD without conversion to ProRes, for retouching photos i'm definitely with Photoshop and then it would probably be nice to use GPU and make things faster.

I would really appreciate any advises or comments on that.

p/s/ another thing I like about dell is that i can have 2 raid0 500GB 7200 with it. No need for external RAID and fast ports like USB3 or Thunderbolt.
DELL also has HDMI, eSata, 2x USB 3.0

Thank you in advance,
Regards,
Denis.
 
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Your MBP can be upgraded to 16gb ram and will run with 1600 mhz. Also you can install a 2nd harddrive in it. In fact I heard that Apple started shipping the next gen mbps with sata 3 in the optibay as well :o ie... you could if one was so inclined, install two ssd's like the Vertex 3 (raid 0 with two 240 / 480 ssds... yum :O).

However wait for them to iron out the small quirks there are at the moment with the optibay sata 3.

My main concern with the mbp (ofcourse after I bought it) is that the native mbp screen is below 1080 :S So you're forced to work with an external screen to get the hd resolution. Not too big a bother of course if you already have an external.

Also remember that the MBP has two graphicscards...

For the record. I like how the CS5 package runs on the mbp 2011 (march edition), and I also tried firing up Avid MediaComp without doing too much in it, seems to run fine.

What's wrong with Thunderbolt? :) Lacie is just around the corner with some new drives that will be awesome to work with, 10gbs can be beat.

Oh and remember, stay clear of the glossy edition. Glossy is really **** when on the move.
 
The AMD and nVidia graphics seem to work equally well with Photoshop 5.5. I use both graphics cards on different machines. The only place where CUDA actually makes a difference is when using Premiere Pro CS5 / C5.5 so, that shouldn't impact your choice. Regardless, make sure you go with Window 7/64 if you go Dell so you can actually use all that RAM you are buying. Of the two, the Dell machine looks better spec'ed for the work you are planning to do. Photoshop on a 15" screen is painful at best. The MBP is highly overpriced, for what you are getting, but that is your choice. By I would not go with either, both Apple, Dell (and HP) have been near the bottom of the reliability ratings. ASUS and Toshiba were at the top.
 
Thank you for your advices.
Nice to know that somebody run CS5 on mbp2011 with no problems.
I also found that video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUyxSJUVQb0
so it seems one can still have ok perfomance even without CUDA (in software mode)

After some thinking now i think it should be either MBP 17 or DELL 17,
i'm going for one of them since I have a discount (I work at the uni, however not related to any photo/video stuff).
For sure, Dell is cheaper, if I lower graphic card (to ATI) and keep everything the same (say 128 SSD, 8 Gb both), the cost is 2051Euro (2200 with Nvidia 3000M),
whereas MBP 17'' costs 2400 here.

On another hand, I can have windows on mac if I need to, but no os-x on Dell.
I tend to think that it's less risk to buy mac and not to regret spending a lot of money.
The only disadvantage is no CUDA.

And yes, Thunderbolt seems to be a solution for RAID, can also use WesterDigital external raid (costs about 150Euro for 2Tb).
 
den59 said:
Dear All,

and I love OS-X. .
Click to expand...

I never got this OS-X vs. Windows thing.
What on earth are you guys doing in the operating system, that makes it so important?

Usually all one does is to open up a folder and copy a file, which is the exactly same process on both systems.
Everything else you are doing in the application - in case of Adobe products, again exact the same look and feel.

So can someone please explain to me why this seems to be so important to a lot of folks?

Back on topic:

If someone makes a business decision to invest in hard/software, the usual rules that they teach in bussiness school apply also here.
In a nutshell: best bang for the buck.

Buy what gives you the most editing power for the money - in this case, the Dell (a 2GB Cuda card blows any MBP out of the water, when working with Premiere).

Go to the ADOBE site and look at the speed gains Cuda vs software.

Frank
 
CUDA does matter

CUDA does matter

I agree that in general it should be "best bang for the buck",
but there's also something one can't compare easily like:
- UI
- design
- stability
- ...
all these are more personal choices, it's like buying cloths from different brands, quality may be comparable,
but the price is different. But I agree that it might not be the wisest approach.

back to the topic (hardware vs software MPE):
at the moment the following is supported by CUDA (preview and final rendering) :

  • some effects (relevant to me are: Brightness, Color Balance, Crop, Fast Color Correction, Levels, RGB curves, Three way CC, Dip to Black, Dip to White, Cross Dissolve)
  • scaling (details here)
  • deinterlacing
  • blending modes
  • color space conversions
"It’s worth mentioning one set of things that Premiere Pro doesn’t process using CUDA: encoding and decoding"
from here:
"Because Premiere Pro CS5 can use CUDA to accelerate scaling, deinterlacing, blending, and many effects, many things that cause a red render bar in software-only (CPU) mode only cause a yellow render bar in GPU acceleration mode. Even more things are accelerated by CUDA in Premiere Pro CS5.5."
so in software MPE mode one might have some complex stuff playing in real time (red bar), but with CUDA chances are higher (yellow bar).
For a i2720qm with GTX555 there's a 10x gain using hardware MPE (rendering). That's a lot. Some more benchmark from tom's hardware.
So yes, CUDA seems to be quite important for general performance.

Friend of mine has new MBP15'' (don't know which 2.0 or 2.2), so I'll try to find a way to run PPBM5 benchmark (which is windows based)
there and come back once/if I have some results...
 
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den59 said:
I agree that in general it should be "best bang for the buck",
but there's also something one can't compare easily like:
- UI
- design
- stability
- ...
all these are more personal choices, it's like buying cloths from different brands, quality may be comparable,
but the price is different. But I agree that it might not be the wisest approach.
.
Click to expand...

The UI in Premiere/PS is the same on all plattforms - UI in the OS doesnt matter for coping files, what else do you do there?

Design: Are you want to work or do you planning to take you laptop to a beauty contest?

Stability is part of he "bang" part in "best bang for the buck" - Unless you really mess with it, a proper installed win7 is rock solid.

Frank
 
One thing to consider; the Mercury Playback Engine hardware acceleration is only available for a limited number of nVidia cards. These seem to be centred around the pro line of Quadro cards, with a few "normal" cards thrown in. So getting the mbp isn't likely going to give you the hardware acceleration you are looking for. I've done some testing and Premiere Pro CS 5/5.5 does run a check to see if the video card is one of the approved ones, otherwise it will go into software mode rather than using the hardware acceleration route. So it does not look like any laptop is going to give you this.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/adobe_PremiereproCS5.html
 
Actually they do support Nvidia 2000M/3000M/4000M/5000M/5010M. But no ATI because it does not have CUDA. So from that point of view PC notebook is a clear winner.
 
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