T7100 vs T7300

Well I ordered my Vostro 1500 a while back with the T7100 and I'm starting to wish I ordered the T7300 slightly. Had a quick search but cant find any benchmarks of these 2 chips against each other, seems to be mainly T7300 vs T7500 which are both 4mb cache.

How much of a difference am I going to notice in games, 3dmark etc?

 

Enough of a difference to more than justify the additional cost. Common wisdom on these boards is that the T7300 is the best price/value combination- the jump from the 2MB L2 cache of the T7100 to the 4MB of the T7300 makes a noticeable difference for a rather low increase in price.

That said, not enough of a difference to change your order- you'll be very happy with the T7100.

 

I was actually thinking the same thing. When I ordered, I only had the choice of the T7100. About an hour after I ordered, I realized I could've went for another combination to get the same stuff but with the T7500 processor for only $200 CAD more. I didn't bother cancelling and re-ordering though.

I have a question. Would the T7300 or the T7500 drain the battery more than the T7100?

 

There may be a slight decrease in battery life - probably not enough to warrant one over the other. There have been numerous tests of the difference between the 2MB and 4MB L2 on the desktop and conclusively, there's ~3% difference. In some apps, mostly media encoding, the difference is larger and is most others, the difference is smaller. However, that's comparing the same clock speed.

Basically you'll get 200MHz extra and another 2-4% improvement on top of that. You decide whether it's worth it. Enough of a difference to more than justify the cost as Durmat would say? I'm not so sure. The price difference was $120 in Canada, which I elected not to spend as I have a desktop to do anything CPU intensive that the 5-10% increase in CPU performance for the T7100->T7300 wouldn't have made a substantial difference in anyways.

 

Buy the 2.6ghz one when it comes out in a month or two from Newegg and pop it in. Don't fret about your 1.8.

 

Ah excellent, is fitting a laptop CPU as easy as a desktop? Cheers everyone!

Thanks for the indepth explanation chuck232, really clears it up for me Glad I stuck with the T7100 now!

 

It's much more extensive, but it's not difficult per se.