XPS M1330 processor question

Hi,

I will be buying the m1330 at some point however cannot afford to go above the base 1.5 C2D processor. Will this, with 2GB ram, be enough to run photoshop and other more demanding apps at a decent pace?

Just looking for a rough idea.

Matt

 

yes, more than enough

 

Yeahh definitely. The 1.5 C2D is pretty good for it's price. Awesome value. Don't worry about performance with it. The 2GB of RAM help a lot too. And I don't know if you got dedicated video or not, but if you did that'll give everything a boost too. But even if you didn't, I think the 1.5 C2D is more than enough for most applications. If you had under 2GB I might worry... but you got that covered so you'll be fine!

 

Yep, that 1.5GHz will be fine for most applications. Of course you'll get more speed with a faster processor, but that along with (more importantly) the 2GB will run Photoshop and other apps just fine.

 

Yeah should be fine. There isn't that big of a difference between them all.

 

dont mean to take over the thread..just ordered one myself! and i cant help wonder if the 2ghz 4mb chip for another $175 would be worth it... =/
im not doing anything nuts but i deffiently do some cpu intensive stuffs

 

Well, look at your cost vs. gains. In Canada it's $110 to upgrade from the T7100 to the T7300 and I didn't think it was worth it for such a small upgrade... not to mention the processor isn't the only thing that dictates performance.

 

Cache memory is expensive!!! That's all I have to say...

 

Lucky fellows getting a new laptop!!!!

I will wait for mine possibly 1-2 years from now when the price will plummet to rock bottom, eg I got my D600 1 month ago with everything for $300.00 .

There you are you can't have everything...

 

L2 Cache

There aren't really any benchmarks for the new processors (T7100+) but if you go look at some reviews for the Core 2 Duo processors from before June and compare the 2MB L2 Cache with the 4MB you'll see that the difference is almost negligible. I believe TechSpot had a benchmark where they compared a bunch of different C2D processors. They noted a relatively consistent percentage speed increase as they escalated through each processor, but noted essentially no additional difference between jump from the 2MB L2 processor to the 4MB L2 processor. I think the application has to specifically be able to take advantage of it, which I doubt many, if any, applications do. I'll try to find the benchmarks tomorrow.

Personally, I think it sounds a lot better than it is. Double the L2 cache sounds like a pretty big difference and people will say "you definitely need it if you're doing intensive work" but I don't think that's true.

Processor Speed

There's a benchmark that was done comparing the various options on the MBP. If you look at the results you'll see some gaming benchmarks for a 2.2GHZ processor and video card with 128mb of ram VS a 2.4GHZ processor and a video card with 256 mb of ram. Depending on the program there was a 0-3 FPS difference (almost nothing). Considering that includes both video memory and a bump in processor I don't think upgrading one notch to a better processor is worth ANYWHERE near $100+... maybe it is for you. That's just my opinion.

 

Benchmarks are subjective and so is everyone's work/usage habits.

I've studied processors (computer engineer here) enough to know that it does offer improvement in some respects, but it all depends on what you are doing (without going too technical since this isn't a lecture on Comp Arch). If you can afford the upgrade, it never hurts to have a bigger cache on hand.

 

It's not whether or not it's affordable, it's whether it's worth it. Based on what you've learned where would you say it offers improvement (something noticeable)? It appears that the you certainly won't see it everywhere.

 

I agree, doubling the cache theoretically has huge value, not sure how well its implemented in this case though. If you can afford it, I would definetely go with one with 4M of cache.

 

Technically, a bigger cache means that you will be more "likely" to hit information that it doesn't need to retrieve from slower memory and even the hard disk. Hence professors always told me that a bigger cache means faster processors and even power savings in laptops.

So... from my "learning experience", it IS worth it. Of course, there are some things that prevent me from preaching this...

#1. I am a more of a "I'll believe it when I see it" person. I haven't experienced faster performance first hand due to cache size increases.... but I never bothered to really pay attention to it either.

#2. Every processor is different. When I learned about processors, we took apart a Pentium 4 proc. Now, its Core 2 Duo... could be totally different. (multiple procs are tricky)

#3. I had something else to say ... but it evades my mind.

 

Thanks for your reply blahdude. I can see that is has theoretical advantages, but I have yet to see (I'd be interested to see if there's something out there) anyone actually show a real signficant gain in performance going from a 2MB to 4MB L2 Cache. This is probably one of those big, debateable topics where you can have ideas going around for hours and still have it come down to personal opinion.

I'd think that the money could be better spent on another upgrade, but if you wanted to toss in some money to get the best of the best I'd say sure, go for it.

 

Believe me... don't get any professor started on this topic. They can go on for hours... and hours............ and hoursssssssssss.....

 

Sounds like good times in CS class lol

 

ehhh... I wish I was CS. I was an ECE (Electrical & Computer Engineer)... so we dealt with more hardwareish stuff (like creating processors).

 

Take a look at this review here:

http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=2795&p=4

As you can see, there's a definite improvement for 4MB over 2MB, but the average improvement is something around 3.5%. Now by itself, 3.5% doesn't sound like much, but there are specific applications which really eat up the extra cache. For example, media encoding applications really seem to love the cache, hitting upwards of 10% improvement over the 2MB cache version.

So I think it boils down to what applications you're running.

 

ebay buyers prefer processors to be at least 2 Ghz so i think the $175 premium is worth it for those who will ultimately replace it within a year or 2.

 

In the UK here to push it to 1.8 still with a 2MB cache would be about $260, and to 2.0 with a 4mb cache it would be a somewhat shocking $440+...

 

in canada you can get the 2.2ghz 4mb cache for an extra $210.00 I am thinking that it would be worth the upgrade, or the 2.0ghz 4mb cache for an extra $110.00 so I will be upgrading the processor when I order

 

Another little thing to keep in mind is that the 1.5Ghz chip does not support hardware virtualization. That is not important now, but if you plan on running something like VMWare later on it might degrade performance a little.

With that being said I am planning on doing a little Photoshop, but most browsing and word processing and I got the 1.5Ghz chip.

 

If I got a 1330, that's the processor I'd choose anyways for what I do. Imagine how much cooler it would be vs a 2.0+ in that small case.

 

Interesting review. It appears that you'd only detect a performance difference if you do a lot of video/audio encoding. If that's one of the primary uses for your laptop then I'd say it does appear to be a worthwhile upgrade (depending on where you live). Otherwise, though, the overall performance gain appears to be very small and you wouldn't notice it.

Using their numbers, you'd see about a 2.5% increase in the non-encoding applications, assuming there are no other bottlenecks. I'm not sure what kind of system they tested it on but I'm assuming that the processor was the bottleneck.

So for some back of the napkin calculations:
For a task that would normally take 1 second, it would take 0.975s
5s ---> 4.875s
10s --> 9.75s
30s --> 29.25s
60s --> 58.5s
5m --> 4.875m

That should give a rough estimate of the diffrences in time you would experience for non-encoding applications, with no other bottlenecks, based on the Tom's Hardware Numbers.

Now for encoding the average they got was about 7%, quite an increase. There, assuming no other bottlenecks you should see the following increases:
5s ---> 4.65s
10s --> 9.3s
30s --> 27.9s
60s --> 55.8s
5m --> 4.65m
15m --> 13.95m
30m --> 27.9m
60m --> 55.8m
5h --> 4.65h
15h --> 13.95h
24h --> 22.32h

So, in my opinion it could be worth it if you do a lot of encoding with your laptop. You'll notice a difference if you're doing big projects. Again, I'm not sure how other bottlenecks would come in to play here.

If you don't use encoding applications like these I personally don't think it's worth it, especially in Canada and the UK where it costs hundreds of dollars to upgrade. I know that most of the tasks I perform will take less than a minute to process so there will be virtually no gains, but I would recommend that you do upgrade if the type of computing you do would see benefits.
Overall it comes down to what applications you run, as noted by the previous poster.

 

I will be also playing wow with this notebook do you think that it is worth the upgrade?

 

No.. you don't need a processor upgrade to run WoW. Wow can run on anything

 

okay thanks good to know