How important is GHz?

[Peytah]

Is there that much a difference between 2.2 and 2.5? Also keep in mind that I'm a Graphic Designer. This is the first laptop purchase I'm making. I already know that 4GB of ram is a must.

 

[Theclamshell]

no, you will not notice the difference between those too clock speeds. What computer are you interested in?

 

[vant]

GPU is far more important for you.

You won't notice .23GHz.

 

[mrsir2009]

Nah, you won't notice the speed difference.

 

[m85476585]

That's a 12% difference, which you will probably never notice. It looks like you are looking at the 13", which both have the same GPU, so that won't matter either.

Go with a solid-state drive if you can afford it, and you might even consider 6-8gb of RAM. For both of these I recommend installing it yourself.

 

[63dot]

HD space and RAM are far more important than the differences of the speeds you mention.

 

[sth]

You won't notice a few hundred Mhz more or less. It's more important to have enough RAM (I wouldn't go for less than 4gb atm) and a fast hard-disk (7200rpm or, even better, a SSD drive). A fast graphics card doesn't hurt, even when not using the machine for gaming (OpenCL comes to mind).

A real-world example: I have a 4 year old PC (Athlon64) which I mainly use for gaming. I recently upgraded it to 4gb RAM and a new graphics card and it now easily runs current games at very high settings despite having a totally outdated CPU.

 

[neteng101]

Its going to make a different when applying filters and such...

http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3672&p=9

Even going 2.53 to 2.8 gives a 10% boost or so just with a CPU change.

 

[melman101]

Wow, I can't believe the number of threads in the last day just on this issue alone. I personally went for the 13" 2.53 myself.

melman101

 

[sth]

Even going 2.53 to 2.8 gives a 10% boost or so just with a CPU change.

Yes, because 2.8 is ~10% more than 2.53 BUT
a) More and more programs will do CPU-intensive tasks such as filters or encoding/decoding on the graphics card, which can be many times as fast as the CPU for those things
b) You won't notice those 10% except when sitting next the computer with a stopwatch
c) It does CPU-intensive tasks a tiny bit faster but in the real world, your CPU is sitting idle most of the time

BTW: When it comes to general responsiveness of the system, the best thing you can do at the moment is getting a good SSD drive. They're very expensive, though.