Macbook Pro vs Powermac G5 vs. Mac Pro

Opening and saving of files is going to be slightly slower not because of processor, but because notebook hard drives are slower than desktop hard drives. Even the fastest notebook drives are more focussed on giving you the maximum capacity per square inch over actual speed. Those are clearly operations that are hard drive dependent. The actual processing though on the MacBook Pro when it comes to doing image manipulation is going to be faster because of optimization for the Intel processor in CS3. That said, some have added external SATA*2 hard drives and found them much faster than the internal hard drive or Firewire hard drives on MacBook Pros. Here's an interesting benchmark:

http://www.barefeats.com/hard71.html

Of course this defeats the portability of the MacBook Pro. So you have to weigh in the portability of the MacBook Pro, over your desire for speed.

Is the Mac book Pro faster then my tower?

It really depends on what you're doing and what that depends on. For instance, if you have tasks that heavily rely in HD I/O then the PM G5 will win out. Generally speaking though they're more or less the same.

I just need to know is my Laptop going to run CS3 at a good speed or i should work with the tower instead.

Why don't you wait for CS3 to turn up and see how you go. Everyone's expectations are different and what is acceptable will also then be different.

Having both an MP and MBP C2D I find that for many tasks there's quite a gap between them although given the possible setup of each it's not really a fair fight either.

It really comes down to what you are looking for.

thought you'd enjoy this...

Putting RAID 0 in your MacBook Pro

SlashGear reports that Eric Cheng setup RAID 0 using two 160GB in a MacBook Pro. "He claims the system becomes snappier, but louder and well, a battery power drinker. Cheng's benchmark shows pretty impressing speed increases on the hard drives read and write test." - http://www.macfixit.com


Mac Pro 2GHz 4GB 10K Raptor 23" Cinema Mac OS X (10.4.9) WD RE RAID Aaxeon FW800 PCIe MDD-G4 APC RS1500 Vista

Yeah… saw that. Very cute although I get the feeling the 2nd 160GB drive will have to be PATA rather than SATA which would make me hesitate to use RAID. I wonder if he's using those new 7200rpm 160GB drives too. 😉

Is the Mac book Pro faster then my tower?
I just need to know is my Laptop going to run CS3 at
a good speed or i should work with the tower
instead.

If by CS3 you are talking about Photoshop CS3 and not the other CS3 applications, remember that Photoshop performance depends heavily on the speed of hard disk access. Your tower's hard drive is much faster than any laptop's hard drive, so that if the MacBook Pro and G5 are equal in CPU speed the tower would win due to its faster disk access. In addition, remember that Photoshop performance gets a boost with a separate scratch disk, so if you were using one in your tower the MacBook Pro cannot match that without an attached external disk. On the other hand, if you were running Photoshop on a single disk in your tower, you haven't yet realized the fastest potential performance of your tower, and maybe you shouldn't sell it yet.

.... at least with MBP you can add Express34 eSATA Port Multiplier which some people are doing. Tried that yet?

A couple new Express Cards have come out recently at least.