Is T5470 enough.......Are you happy?

.....getting close to ordering and want to confirm my 5470 vs 7300 decision.
If you have the 5470, has it been enough for a non gamer, business activity
type of use. It seems like most have gone with the 7300, but I was hoping the 5470 would keep my lappy happy.

 

If your not a gamer then the T5470 is MOREEEE than enough. Even with intensive games and programs it can still perform more than well. Many people think the upgraded procesorr will give them a big boost in performance but it does not. Upgrading ram and getting a 7200rpm hdd is a better upgrade. Stick with the T5470 as its on of the newest chips available, and even the last set of chips were more than enough, even for those most demanding programs.

 

If you are talking about the 1.6 , I'm very happy with mine..and I've been playing Bioshock, Prey, etc...

 

the post above me says it all. .33 Ghz isn't all that necessary since the gfx is the bottleneck. It's like the lungs and the legs. the legs can go and go but the lungs can only do so much. legs are the proc and lungs are the gfx in this case

 

I'm very happy with mine, even running intensive photo editing programs like Capture NX. Anything more is really overkill.

 

Thanks for the quick and encouraging replies.

 

Absolutely. I have played Bioshock with no issues at all. As stated, it's all about the GFX card.

 

If you don't need hardware virtualization, T5470 is as good as the higher processor for most daily tasks.

 

why would I need hardware virtualization, what is it ?

 

if you plan to have a laptop for long term, better go with t7300 .. it got 4mb cache... sure for now, t5470 is enough.. in 1 year or 2; maybe not.. electronic grow very fast, better have good stuff not too costy to run it longer. unless you have mucho money to get new laptop every 2 years..

 

The T7300 is faster...

By how much? It depends, but it will be noticeably faster.

 

I actually think it's better $$$ wise to get a new laptop every 2 years...

You end up spending a lot for tech now that you can't utilize until a year or 2 down the road anyway, and by then something better has come along for a reasonable price.

Case in point people buying screaming ultra high end video cards 2 years ago... sure they ran 300fps with games of the time, but that looks the same as 100fps that the card 1/4 the price would have looked like.

Now their screaming video cards are right on par for the newer games... so did they really future proof?

Not really... because current ones have more advanced features as well as more speed... more pipes, rendering techniques, who knows what.

So in the end you could have spent $400 2 years ago to have a rocking experience that really wasn't that much better in real world results, but ended up today with hardware that while fast enough, lacks the bells and whistles that came out recently.

Or you could have spent $150 2 years ago, had a prefectly good experience, and then today put $250 into a nice mid line video card with more cool features than that rocking one from 2 years ago would have had.

The point is, it doesn't just get faster, it gets better (the 45nm chip mentioned below is a perfect example). So buying too far into the future just guarantees you will miss out on the good stuff at good prices later. It applies to all realms of computers... dual AGP mobo for SLI? Everything went PCIE; bought a mobo that supports the newest socket set so you can upgrade to the faster P4 later? by the time that comes along a core2duos are the real bargain for power; Get 4 GB of RAM when XP came out? By the time Vista rolls around PC3200 is a joke and you have to upgrade anyway.

Always buy what you need now and buy a new one later, the era of the future proof comp is gone, it's all disposable now.

Same goes for almost every component.. unless you just have to have the best and show off to your lan party buddies, don't overextend your $$$.

 

i would wait for the coming 45nm CPU which has same socket P with higher computing power and lower thermal power.

 

You also could always just upgrade your CPU later....Why pay Dell 150-200 for extra power you don't really need now.... You could probably wait about 6-12 months when you actually need it, and buy the same thing off newegg for 50 bucks...

 

Hardware virtualization, now, is important to software developers like me who want to run virtualization software (like VMWare) in 64bit mode. It was the reason I couldn't go any lower than a T7100, but since I scored the T7300 for a $10 upgrade over the T5470 is was a better choice price erformance wise...

Hardware virtualization COULD become an important future proofing buy as well. There is much debate in the tech community that operating systems should make extensive use of virtualization internally to isolate applications and protect the system from being hosed. With hardware virtualization support this is something that is getting serious consideration since it can be done orders of magnitudes faster than software based virtualization.

But basically, if you're not a developer or other IT professional who has a definite need for hardware virtualization don't worry about it. As you might end up replacing your machine before OSs make extensive use of hardware virtualization.

 

Great answers. Thank you.