Are current 1647/5370 shipping with 130w adapter?

? or is is still the old 90w adapter?

And is the jump from a i5 450 -> 520/540 worth it?

 

I got the 90W Adapter and I haven't had any throttling issues (when watching HD movies, haven't played any games). I think it should be sufficient, as it takes less voltage than the quad-cores, but if you have any serious throttling issues you can call them/chat and try to get a 130W adapter. Bare in mind, the 90W adapter is slim and light, compared to the 130W adapter which is much heavier and double the size. Regarding the i5, the 450M is an excellent processor and not worth the jump to 520M just for a higher turbo boost when they have the same base clock speeds. The 540M is really up to you if you think the little bump in clock speeds is worth the extra cash. In the end, I feel when you go for the top end models, the price erformance ratio is definitely not worth it. Ofcourse for some people, they want the best/top of the line, where money is not an issue. I say go for the i5-450M and say, after a year you can get the i5-540M much cheaper if you feel the need for it. The jump from i5-450M -> i5-540M, you wont notice any of the difference from when your watching HD movies or daily tasks, unless your doing serious CPU intensive tasks where you can shave off a little time. If you want to notice a performance difference, then look into investing into an SSD, thats where you can see a difference right away (I have a 256GB SSD, butt they are expensive. You can always upgrade yourself in the future when the price will drop a lot on these, and even now they have some good deals online with rebates)

 

It shouldn't make a huge difference since only one of the cores clocks up. The only advantage to having a 130W adapter instead of a 90W adapter is being able to charge your battery up faster while gaming Unless you deal with AES encryption, there's not much of a reason.

 

1647s still ship with 90W, but it doesn't seem to be too hard to talk Dell out of a 130W.

450 - 520 isn't much of a difference, just an increase in max boost, not worth the $100, when for $160 you can get a 540 which is faster all around.

 

In Australia, the 1647 ships with the 90W adapter. You can go through the config and it even tells you at the end in the summary.

 

All 1647's ship with the 90w globablly. Only the 1645 comes with the 130w, but you can request one as seeker suggested.

 

Yeah I'm thinking I'd rather save the $160 and put it towards the warranty. THe 540 seems solid, but for my uses perhaps unneccesary. I assume the 450 is far superior to an old core 2 duo 2.53 ghz?

Is the x-fi soundblaster card worth it? I do listen to tons of music.

 

Yes the i5-450M is superior to a C2D. I am a music fanatic like you, but the x-fi soundblaster is not a card, but software, which is not worth it. Stick with the standard HD audio, its good enough.