Question New laptop for black friday

nwgarratt

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I haven't bought a new laptop for a very long time. My laptop is over 10 years old and have a Samsung N130 (atom 1.6ghz) netbook from 2009 with a dying battery.

I have £300 to spend on a new laptop. How is the AMD A10 9600p for a cpu? I only intend to do internet, office and HD video encoding (would like to use multi cores for that) and bluetooth audio. I have not intention of playing games.

I have tried out a couple AMD 7410 processor laptops (also bought at £300) and l like the speed of them. I did notice the gpu is slower at 720mhz vs 847mhz for the 7410. What difference does that really make in the real world.
 
Honestly, you'd be better off buying or building a PC for HD encoding at that budget, else you'll be there forever. If it must be a laptop, go with whichever has the best GPU for the money, CPU is less important for encoding - and don't focus on mhz, compare benchmarks.

Really tho, you want to ignore the black friday hype and save up until your budget is higher or maybe consider something refurbished or second hand.
 
I am not in the hype, I have been looking at laptops for about 6 months. £300 is my limit and a building a pc is no go nor have I got the space for one.

My current pc does encoding at 4fps and takes up to 4 days to do 1080p ! I was hoping the laptop would be a alternative option

So what cpu if not a AMD 9600 and still £300?

I have seen a HP one I like for £299.
 
As I said, best off to look at benchmarks and weigh up the tradeoffs, then consider a refurb or second hand to get best bang for buck.
 
But I want new not second hand/refurb. All I want is something that will handle HD encoding / blu ray better than I have now without waiting days.

Benchmarks all good but I am more interested in reality not want some chart come up with what should be possible. It's all too confusing and I am computer literate so god know how the most people think when looking at that data.
 
Hardware these days includes built in video encoders for popular formats (H.264 and, for the latest hardware, HEVC and VP9). If your encoding software supports it then you can use either that or the main CPU. Intel's is called Quicksync, AMD's VCE and nVidia's NVENC. They're generally listed as part of the integrated graphics so I think that's what nedge meant when they said look at the GPU.

Quicksync does tend to be better supported than VCE, and Intel CPUs are often faster as well under the same amount of cooling, although video encoding often does suit the Excavator CPU design behind the 9600p (which is a completely different design from the 7410's Puma CPU cores by the way, although the GPU is the same design ;) )
 

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