Laptop processor

[craig777]

Looking for a bit of advice.

Now I know you'll all say the following two processors are like chalk & cheese, but...

...would I notice/feel a vast amount of difference between a 'Celeron M430' processor and a 'Core 2 Duo T5500' processor? My laptop usage will be mainly for surfing the net, storing/viewing digital images, burning the odd cd/dvd, so by no means heavy use.

edit: BTW, not looking at running Vista if that's of any help.

 

[Steven]

A budget buyer I presume?

With Core Duo/C2D available in laptops from £450-500, there really is no reason to get a laptop with a celeron/sempron processor. You owe it to yourself and your wallet Even though you are only doing office tasks and nothing heavy duty like video encoding, you will still notice the benefits of a multi-core processor. Everything will just be so much zippier and no lag when you run multiple apps is a god-send - believe me, I came from a pentium desktop CPU to a CD laptop

And minimum 1gb ram due to Vista. I like to use pricerunner to research laptops - change ram amount, HD space, processor type (I'd leave processor speed alone as they've not done that well), sort by price and go

 

[shay0]

You've got to take into account, you will probably see a performance drop with a Core Duo CPU if you aren't running apps written for dual core CPUs.

Now that may sound stupid and I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it, but I've seen it in action, at work. We replaced a bunch of Dell D610 laptops, running bog standard CPUs, with Dual Core laptops and to a man, every user found them to be slower. They were running Office apps, Email and Internet surfing predominantly, but it's something to bear in mind.

 

[craig777]

So with my intended usage, I could see the same if not better performance with a Celeron processor compared with a C2D...?

 

[shay0]

Well, TBH surfing the web is going to be more influenced by your connection speed. Burning CD/DVDs are going to be dependant on the speed of your actual burner. Images I would say are going to be heavily influenced by your graphics card.

Therefore, overall you probably would end up with similar performance at the moment, but going forward as software is written to use Dual Core CPUs, you should see a difference. As it stands though, it would depend how much difference in price you were talking between the 2 machines, whther it would be worth the extra or not.