* The official 2018 MacBook Pro thread (it has six cores and everything!) *

Combat squirrel · 15 Nov 2018 at 13:24

ElliotHand said:
Radeon GPU upgrades are now available on the Apple website, £225 option for Vega 16 or £315 for Vega 20.

Anyone if these have been benchmarked or if they're worth upgrading to? Early speculation seemed to suggest that they're likely to be more efficient and cooler than the standard 560X so wonder if they'd help with the MacBook pro's throttling issues?

Word on the web seems to show them at around 1070/1080 level, which isn't to shabby to be fair, the drawback is only 4gb video memory.

I would now consider a MBP with these video cards as a main machine, 6 core, 32gb ram, vega 20 should be a good work horse and rivals the mac mini and imac pro in terms of single thread CPU performance and is plenty good enough on the multi core front unless your own absolute mission critical work.

For me, as a wedding photographer it would be a very nice machine indeed - for use at home with TB3 monitors for colour accurate work and if I wanted a TB3 eGPU - but a vega 20 is plenty for photo/video work and light gaming.

Its all down to thermals as you say.

Beansprout · 16 Nov 2018 at 17:56

A couple weeks ago I inadvertently spilt coffee (I know I know) on my 2017 MPB, so picked up a new one, the 15" / 2.6Ghz / 16Gb RAM / 512Gb SSD spec. Transferred everything overnight with target disk mode from my old MBP. With most data in the cloud or on a NAS or 4Tb+ USB hard disks I've currently got 200Gb free so don't think it's worth upgrading beyond the 1Tb SSD.

It has a slightly revised keyboard which is a small but good improvement, and at a pure guess having the 2 extra cores does seem to help with responsiveness when I have quite a lot open.

I don't do any video work so can't tell you anything about that side though.

I do however now have Applecare....

ChrisD. · 18 Nov 2018 at 11:44

Trying to decide if 32GB RAM is worth it. I do occasionally run up some Microsoft labs, I guess it may help but that’s once in a blue moon and I have two ESXi hosts at home with 64GB RAM each and 12 cores between them with HT.

MacRS4 · 18 Nov 2018 at 11:46

I guess it depends how big your labs are. My 2017 16Gb could handle a DC, Skype for Business, a Win 10 client and at a push an Exchange 2016 server. OK for demos, bit painful to 'work' on. With 32Gb it runs my entire lab of DC, SfB, Exchange, Win10 and external stuff for Mobiles etc.

Above normally runs on my Mac Mini however it's useful to have it available locally when out and about.

ChrisD. · 18 Nov 2018 at 12:09

Normally a DC, Exchange, few clients. Last time I ran one up for a demo it was a bit painful!

MacRS4 · 18 Nov 2018 at 12:57

In Fusion or Parallels? I find Fusion scales better than Parallels, but Parallels is faster overall. I normally build individual servers with decent core/RAM, let them run for a while to do all their indexing and stuff, and then cut the RAM. I tend to leave all the machines with a lot of cores (oversubscribed, effectively) and the performance isn't too shabby.

ChrisD. · 18 Nov 2018 at 14:21

I’m using Fusion Pro.

MacRS4 · 18 Nov 2018 at 15:16

Fusion 11 is a mess tbh. I've been talking to their Dev people via Twitter, there's a new patched release due out any day. It's unusable for me at the minute.

ChrisD. · 18 Nov 2018 at 16:25

How do? I’ve only got the one VM running on it to be fair.

MacRS4 · 19 Nov 2018 at 01:58

I hate posting my videos here ahaha. But. Yer. I think if you *only* use Fusion you'll be fine. Like I say I've been talking to VMware devs they have logs and stuff from my things, and there'll be a patch out soon apparently. I'll follow up the vid with something less....meow.

ChrisD. · 19 Nov 2018 at 09:50

Just found out that my housemate is an active student, how much of a saving can I expect if I order a MacBook through him?

chanjy · 19 Nov 2018 at 10:58

10% I believe.. it used to be more and free 3 years of Applecare!

ChrisD. · 19 Nov 2018 at 11:03

It isn't actually that much cheaper than what I can get it for using defense discount.

Spit · 19 Nov 2018 at 19:38

Really love mine. This is the first time that a laptop feels like it has desktop power to me.

MacRS4 · 20 Nov 2018 at 10:45

ChrisD. said:
Just found out that my housemate is an active student, how much of a saving can I expect if I order a MacBook through him?

It's 10%. Be careful though, you can only use it once per academic year.

ChrisD. · 20 Nov 2018 at 11:10

MacRS4 said:
It's 10%. Be careful though, you can only use it once per academic year.

Since it was his account, I decided against it. The difference on a £2900 or so MacBook was around £100, not really worth any potential hassle.

However I have spied a few bargains on the refurb store, there is an i9, 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD for £3,139.00. There was a 2TB one yesterday for £3500 ish. The model I'd be after (32GB of RAM, 512GB SSD and middle CPU or better) however doesn't look to be as big a saving. Currently 2,829.00 for the i9/32GB/512GB SSD versus £3,129.60 for a brand new one. Then again it's a few hundred that could go towards Apple Care.

I am waiting on some invoices being paid before I make a decision. It's a lot of money and my 13" is doing fine in all honesty!

ElliotHand · 20 Nov 2018 at 12:32

If spending ~£3k on a laptop not sure I'd want a refurb unit if savings are only ~10%.

Apparently Black Friday sale for Apple on 23rd so not sure if there will be any MacBook offers but prob worth holding on to check before committing either way.

b0rn2sk8 · 20 Nov 2018 at 13:15

It will just be a token iTunes voucher like normal. Don’t expect any money off.

chanjy · 20 Nov 2018 at 13:20

Think their usual offer is 0% finance rather than a discount

ElliotHand · 20 Nov 2018 at 13:25

Oh, I'd assumed you'd at least get some Beats headphones!

*** The official 2018 MacBook Pro thread (it has six cores and everything!) ***

* The official 2018 MacBook Pro thread (it has six cores and everything!) *