Is the T7100 enough for me?

I am going to be buying a Vostro 1400 very soon now and am wondering if the T7100 will be enough. The new pre-made deal has the highest CPU I can pick being a T7100 but last week it was T7300 which was a higher clock speed and had a 4MB cache. Now I know that higher numbers = better but is this a big jump? Is a T7500 a big jump from a T7100? I intend to do light gaming and CPU intensive things like Virtual Machines almost constantly and alot of decompressing RAR's and Decoding files from usenet. I am planning to make this laptop my new test system for Virtual Machines and such as my current PC has a AMD X2 3800+ running at 2.4 GHz. I hope I gave enough information for a answer and if not ask and I will post more. TYIA for you responses.

 

Depends on what you will do w/ it.

I have 1.6ghz c2d cpu on M90, but all I do is play games on it which is mainly worked by the GPU.

I had 2.16ghz on it before, but it hardly made any difference in gaming.

 

Well I did mention in my post that I will be doing alot of Virtual Machine work and light gaming. Also alot of decompressing RAR's, Decoding usenet files, and I will probably do some graphics work in Adobe/Flash/etc. I will make use of the T7100 probably to its fullest but is it worth the extra $150+ to get a T7300 or T7500 is what im asking I guess.

Note: I say +$150 because I would have to not use the pre-made package and that would forfit the discounts so its probably like +$300 more.

 

T7100 will be enough.

All those softwares are single-cored AFAIK so you won't see a big improvement, even over a Pentium 4 3.6 let's say

 

buy a 1400 with celeron cpu and upgrade to T7500 in aftermarket. this could be the same price as you pay to dell with T7100.

 

Well the jump to a T7100 is +$180 and I can't find anywhere near that price for the T7500 but maybe im looking in the wrong spot. Any suggestion on that?

 

you have to subscribe a search on ebay so that you could catch best deal. today a T7500 ended up @US$148 (Item number: 220167925721)

 

I have a T7100 and I have seen one of my friend's notebook with a T7500 but I hardly notice any performance difference between the two while I do intensive Photo Editing tasks using Photoshop.... All T7xxx series support the Hardware Virtual Machine instructions and so not much difference will be seen while working with VMs between the two.... I bet it will hardly be a second or two faster while doing highly intensive tasks which will be noticed only while you do benchmarks but for practical usage it will all be the same IMO.... The only advantage of a T7300 or T7500 is the extra 2 MB cache but I doubt it will show a direct boost in perf....

 

OK well assuming I don't want to mess around with EBay and want the Dell warranty that getting this CPU from Dell gives me, is the extra $180 for the T7100 worth it and on the same note is the additional $250+ for T7500 worth it?

Just saw Ash's post and I tend to agree that I expected those results. Makes me think T7100 will be enough. Thanks for the input Ash.

 

Just a word of warning, all warranties will be voided by upgrading a CPU.

 

i would put back original cpu if i need send it back for repair, but this does save me over $200...

 

There's a sticker on the CPU that if tampered with, voids the warranty.

 

no sticker on my cpu...

 

Guess Dell doesn't do it on their Vostros. Anyways, what I said before is still true, tampering with the CPU is an automatic warranty voider.

 

i have 5 dell laptops (1 inspiron, 3 latitude, 1 vostro) and none of them has sticker in their cpus.

 

K well either way if the T7100 dies I can get Dell to replace it without dealing with Intel. I think I will go with the T7100 but back to my question is the T7300/T7500 worth the upgrade?

 

with dell's price, i won't buy any cpu higher than T5470.

 

Unless heavy video encoding, photoshop and CPU-intensive games are daily and necessary activities the T7100 is more than sufficient.

 

I may very well use the CPU to 100% daily. Assuming I do, is the 200MHz and 2MB of cache worth $385 more for the T7300 which can only be added if I don't use a pre-made package. Also the jump to a T7500 is $550. Also I could just buy the T7500 for like $300 from NCIX but then we get into warranty issues and its still like $120 more than T7100.

 

$550 for T7500 is simply a rip off.

 

Well that is if I got it from Dell because I would have to leave the pre-made packages. What I am getting from all this is go with the T7100 it will be enough even for CPU intensive stuff. I could get a bit more out of a T7500 but its seconds difference not minutes.

 

if you do video encoding stuff, the difference is more than noticeable.

 

Most benchmarks I could find seemed to suggest a 10-20 second difference. Are you saying its more like 1-5 minutes faster? Would you say 10%, 20%, etc. faster?

 

video encoding might last hours, an over 20% boost from T7100 to T7500 means dozens minutes time saving.

 

Hmm will you be getting the same video card with both these processors?

 

look for aftermarkket CPU on ebay for cheap. Not worth to upgrade ondell if pricing is about the same . T7300 and up will do better in video encoding times . gaming and other task wont make difference

 

7100 to 7500 is a ripoff. You are better off just padding your system with more memory. Or just build a desktop for $500.