As my sig states, I play Oblivion on a MacBook Pro. Or I did, until awhile back when I dropped it while showing something to a professor while walking down stairs (yes, i know, stupid) and it crashed down onto a stone floor. Shattered, actually. My heart broke - for a lot of reasons - but one big reason was because Oblivion played so well on my old 2007 MacBook.

Now, through the benefits of some generosity and a warranty, I'm going to buy a new one. These are the stats:

MacBook Pro
2.66 GHz Intel QuadCore i7
4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 Ram
500 GB Solid State Hard Drive
NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 512 mb

Assume I need a laptop and that laptop has to be a Mac (the former because my career/collegiate training requires me to have on-site access to Adobe Masterworks and the latter because all my graphics software - about 5k worth - is for Apple).

I've read that solid state hard drives improve performance. But is it worth the extra money?

Second, is it worth another 300 dollars to up grade my ram to 8 gig, when my processor is the size it is?

Also, I know Oblivion doesn't use quad cores, so is there any benefit at all to getting the QuadCore for Oblivion?

Thanks for the help.

~ Dani ~

I had to look at Apple's website to see if there really was a 500GB SSD option, but it actually comes with a stock 500GB HDD. The 512GB SSD upgrade is a ridiculous amount to pay for that extra performance. It's hard for me to justify the price/capacity ratio of SSDs still, so I don't really find it worth it. There is improved performance so long as you do not fill up too much of the capacity because it does get worse if you fill up too much. If anything just get a 7200rpm HDD in my opinion.

4GB of RAM is plenty already. If your graphics software makes use of more RAM, then it might be a little beneficial, but that's steep for $300 more.

Oblivion doesn't make use of quads, so it's naturally not going to benefit from one.

Thanks for your advice. That did help.

I dropped the 4GB ram and I dropped the SDD hard drive and the bookstore (where I'm buying it) upgraded the 500GB ATA from a 5400 RPM to a 7200 RPM for free. They also threw in a Western Digital 2T external drive as part of the "sell."

Final cost, with educational discount, AppleCare 3 year warranty, and sales tax: $2189.30