Hello! I’m trying to figure out what kind of chipset/shared RAM would best suit a given scenario. There are two graphic-intensive things I use my current setup for (late 2019 i9 32GB MBP), and both seriously drive the Activity and CPU/GPU nuts slowing everything down to molasses.

  1. I regularly need to use three screens for work. The built-in retina display, an external monitor, and a 65" Promethean board (a Promethean board is similar to a SmartBoard). All three need different information on them. Currently, I need to downsize the resolution on the external monitor to avoid lag/freezing.

  2. I do a fair amount of video editing using Final Cut Pro. I’m not importing 4K video, but I do regularly need to combine several 3-5GB video files into several multi-cam clips. The background tasks often slow the process down. While scrolling the timeline view to insert titles the audio track preview (waveform) doesn’t render for several minutes.

My questions are how to avoid this on a future laptop. Would the extra GPU cores on the M2 chips do a better job with these tasks or is this a CPU issue? Would there be a noticeable difference between the Pro and Max chips and/or 32GB versus 64GB? Ideally, I would like to be running both Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro at the same time.

Thanks in advance for any replies. The new shared RAM has me scratching my head.

  • Skullvalanche
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    21 year ago

    Basically max out everything you can afford to max out. GPU is more important lately than CPU for most things, get as much of that and as much RAM as you can afford.

    • @nuachtanOP
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      11 year ago

      Thanks! I appreciate the advice. I’m a little disappointed my lat e 2019 is already showing signs of needing to be upgraded.

      • Skullvalanche
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        31 year ago

        Have you used an Apple Silicon machine before? They are a huge leap in performance. Even a “bad” one is likely to run circles around your Intel one.

        (I upgraded from a 2019 to a 2021 M1 Max. It was a night-and-day upgrade.)

        • @nuachtanOP
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          11 year ago

          I haven’t no. Stil trying to figure out the whole system-on-a-chip thing.