Is this right for me?

[samtoohey93]

Hi Guys,
I used to own a SP2 64GB variant until my partner upgraded her macbook pro 13 inch to a new macbook air. I ended up taking her old pro (until it died last week), I'm considering buying a pro 3, but I want to make sure it is right for me. I was looking at the 128GB model because it is cheap at harvey norman this weekend in aus.

I have a gaming laptop so I won't be gaming on it.
I am a full time real estate agent and marketing manager and part time uni student. So i spend most of my days on websites, in Adobe creative cloud and using my camera kit with SD cards and the like (I have a hub from my old SP2 that I diligently use). Im also constantly in spreadsheets and every other part of office with Outlook open pretty much 8 till 6.


My question is, is 4 GB of Ram enough for me? It seemed that way with the pro 2 but with the smallest size capacity I never really pushed it.

 

[nipponham]

4GB with Adobe CC? I don't think so... You're going to want 8GB at least. And I hope you're going with the i7. If you're not going to be doing too much image editing, you should be able to get away with SP3's integrated GPU.

 

[kevinlevrone]

If you never really pushed your SP2, why would you push the SP3 further ? I think 4GB is enough for 2-3 years, for office and student use. If you use 3D modeling, programming with multiple virtual machines, etc. then it may be a problem but even then you can still manage. I'm still not sure what are the requirements for the upcoming Windows 10, but I think it will be very optimized to also run on low-end hardware so it should be fine.

 

[hughlle]

Other than form factor, there is not that much difference between the sp2 and sp3 in terms of what it can do. Were you happy with the sp2?

 

[GreyFox7]

I would agree that if you were ok on the SP2 the 128gb SP3 should be ok.
That partly hinges on the meaning of Never really pushed it...
It could mean you never overtaxed the capabilities of the SP2 while doing everything you needed.
Or
It could mean you didn't do taxing work on the SP2 by choice to avoid overtaxing it.
I think you meant the former.

If one of those real estate locations has a money tree and your free to pick what you want, then by all means get the i7 model.

 

[Gary.M]

I have the i5 128gb 4gb SP3 and mostly use it for 3d and for sketching. Currently running Maya, 3ds Max, Zbrush, Keyshot and various related utilities, Photoshop, Corel Painter and Sketchbook pro. With regards the 3d it only ever bogs down once I get into ridiculous polygon counts. Sure, I may not be a power user but it suits me and my needs fine.

 

[Snickers]

If you can afford the 8gb version then why not go for it? You can't really have too much memory.- you just might not use all of it very often.
If you are anything like me, you won't regret getting more if you end up with hundreds of emails open, lots of browser tabs going and a lot of other open programs you switch between.

If you go for the 4gb I suspect it will be fine for most of the time, but you might find that there is the odd occasion where you notice it slows a bit and you wish you had more. Like most things though, it depends on what you do with it

 

[TestudoAubreii]

Hi Guys,
I used to own a SP2 64GB variant until my partner upgraded her macbook pro 13 inch to a new macbook air. I ended up taking her old pro (until it died last week), I'm considering buying a pro 3, but I want to make sure it is right for me. I was looking at the 128GB model because it is cheap at harvey norman this weekend in aus.

I have a gaming laptop so I won't be gaming on it.
I am a full time real estate agent and marketing manager and part time uni student. So i spend most of my days on websites, in Adobe creative cloud and using my camera kit with SD cards and the like (I have a hub from my old SP2 that I diligently use). Im also constantly in spreadsheets and every other part of office with Outlook open pretty much 8 till 6.


My question is, is 4 GB of Ram enough for me? It seemed that way with the pro 2 but with the smallest size capacity I never really pushed it.

I am going to be honest, I did not read much of the replies. I will tell you why I think the 4GB may be alright for the reasons you explained.

I think that the 4GB model will do "okay". I wound up going with the i5/8GB model because I usually run multiple programs at a time, and I figured "Why not?".

Just to put it in perspective a bit, at work I was using a 8 year old Dell laptop with a Core2Duo 2.00 GHz with 3 GB of RAM and a 320 GB HDD and I had the CC version of Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, multiple browsers and many browsers tab up and running at the same time. It is still up and running actually. I just switched to the SP3 maybe a month ago. I have done mostly all of my web development and design and graphic design projects (including huge billboard projects) on this old machine.

Did it slow down? Sure, but not enough to actually hinder production. The point: I figured if my work Dell was able to run all of that stuff, the SP3 i5/4GB would certainly be able to handle it.