[Anders Peter Amsnæs]

Will it work ok? ...or will the fan spin uncontrollably and wake up the house if I set the machine to work at night?

(I am on an aging MacPro (2007), so a speed bump would be much appreciated. The new MacBook's scores double in GeekBench than what my MacPro does.)

[itsallgoode9]

Will it work ok? ...or will the fan spin uncontrollably and wake up the house if I set the machine to work at night?

(I am on an aging MacPro (2007), so a speed bump would be much appreciated. The new MacBook's scores double in GeekBench than what my MacPro does.)

If you're looking at rendering on your laptop, one thing you should look into is doing a remote desktop setup and logging in to your home computer and rendering on that, instead of your laptop. I just went through this process of trying to figure out what to do about laptop usage and maxwell rendering. Of course, that depends on the speed of your home computer, but you should look in to it.

I generally do that when working at home so I can sit on my couch and watch tv but still have the render power of my desktop.

[kami]

I think those new macbook pros (with the fastest processor) are so fast, that they are not much slower than my two year old mac pro (dual xeon quad)...
So I bet they would work quite well as rendering machine. You could try to find some cinebench results for them (http://www.barefeats.com/) for comparison

edit:
ok, it still is a bit slower ...
according to this site: http://www.cbscores.com/
the 2year old mac pro (early '09 dual quad with 2.93 GHz) is still twice as fast as the fastes macbook pro.

[Anders Peter Amsnæs]

I got a 2.2 GHz MacBook Pro. It's about twice as fast as my 2006 MacPro for Maxwell renders. I am going to install some more ram as well - maybe that will make it even faster?

From what I hear it's about equal to cheapest current Mac Pro. New Mac Pro's are probably on the way.

[Bubbaloo]

More RAM won't make it render faster, but it will increase the amount of scene complexity it can render.