I have an early 2011 (8.2) MBP (i7@2.0Ghz) which I've upgraded to 16Gig memory and 512 Gig SSD.
I am a heavy CPU and IO user: vagrant, Vmware Fusion, external display, Office, various IDE's (Xcode, Eclipse derivatives for Scala, Ruby,Java), IntelliJ, Webstorm, databases – Postgres, Mongo, MySQL. The main pigs are my VMs (esp win 8 ) which crucify the Fan; I am going deaf but it is so annoying that the fan just ramps up and down the whole time, the machine gets quite hot too but I have an external keyboard and mouse which mitigates that unpleasantness.
Geekbench seems to suggest that I will be 25% better off in raw performance terms with a later machine.
Will the noise/heat/performance be any better if I get a late MBP with an equivalent spec?
Best Answer
You can do something to try to make your macbook run a bit cooler:
If you are using an external monitor you can disable the internal screen, while leaving the lid open. This reduces the stress on the GPU and improves cooling: use a (very small) magnet to make the macbook think that the lid is closed. See my answer here: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/110535/34825
You can disable the CPU turbo boost. One easy way is using this utility: http://www.rugarciap.com/turbo-boost-switcher-for-os-x/
Also, make sure you have trim configured on your SSD.