Thinking about exchanging my 2011 13" i7 for 13" i5 (virtualization question)

Will the difference in the 13" procs pose any difference in performance when I'm using my VM's? Right now, I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate for my torrenting and media needs and I was thinking about running BackTrack Linux to dive into some white hat hacking. Advice absolutely appreciated. Thinking about exchanging laptops first thing in the morning, a student's budget is tight nowadays.

Reply 1 : Thinking about exchanging my 2011 13" i7 for 13" i5 (virtualization question)

You shouldn't run into issues in going with the Core i5 13" MBP. Both processors in the 13" MPB are very capable and still ahead of last year's dual-core Core i7 15" and 17" MBP models. The only reason I went with the Core i7 model is that the Intel IGP can overclock higher on it (I think by about 300MHz), the i7 itself can overclock to a faster rate, and I wanted my notebook to come with at least a 500GB hard drive. Factor in those costs and the extra $300 was worth it for me.



I have a friend that went with the Core i5 13" MBP and he likes it, no performance issues under Parallels (though you are using VM, performance should be similar). He routinely has Windows 7 Home Premium up with SigmaPlot along with MATLAB and Excel open in Mac OS X without experiencing performance hiccups.

Reply 2 : Thinking about exchanging my 2011 13" i7 for 13" i5 (virtualization question)

Do you need VT-d?



The i5 (which is apparently a 2410M, although Apple try not to let on) doesn't have that instruction set.



It also doesn't do Trusted Execution, if you need that. All the other differences just relate to cache, clock speed & such.