Thinking about buying a I8600 some questions

Pentium®M Processor,1.5GHz,15.4 WSXGA+
512mb ram
128mb video card
40-60gb hard drive (depends on the deal)
Dell 802.11b/g wireless
dvd/cdrw

Hopefully coming to around $2500 including tax (Cnd)
Its about $500 for the upgrade to the dothan and there isn't that much differnce between performance. Also since the banias motherboard can handle the dothan i may upgrade later when prices come down.
I went with the wsxga+ since from what ive heard it does look good. It also puts me in the right area for gaming resolution. If it comes down to it i might not even have scratch that to lower the price.
I wont be going with the 7200rpm hard drive as from I have heard on benchmark tests it only accounted for a 5% gain. And when you put it into real world applications you probably wont tell the difference.
Hoping for a free video card and hard drive upgrade.

I dunno maybe you guys can chime in with any suggestions etc.

 

If that were an option at dell.ca I would but they stick you with 512mb right off the bat. Right now they are offering an upgrade to 1gb but I know of no games that require 512mb of ram. Im doing fine with 256 right now.

Also although the 9100 is tempting I do need battery life.

 

looks good, although to save money I would buy a stick of 256 from Dell, then get another 256 or even 512 from Newegg.

 

Hi winters,
Just one comment.
Not sure where you heard a 7200 only gives a 5% increase....was that over a 5200rpm? I upgraded my Hitachi 60GB 4200 to a 60GB 7200 and the difference is very noticeable, full boot to xp in 29 seconds vs 46 seconds on the 4200 and all programs load & run much faster. I would say it the best upgrade for any notebook. I would say it has increased overall performance on my thinkpad by nearly 25% and disk I/O by 33%

Jack

 

I have to agree with bootleg...the biggest performance boost I had with my 8600 was the addition of the 7200 RPM Hard Drive.

 

Yeah that was the 5200rpm. And when my dads 8600 had only a bit of stuff on it it would boot up in about 30 seconds.

 

I have a 8600 with 7200RPM 60Gig HD and 768MB of RAM (Bought with 256MB from dell and bought 512MB from Crucial.com for $125) and I'm thrilled with it. One thing to take note of is the cache on the 2 Hard Drives (HD). The 4200 and 5400 RPM's have 2MB of cache and the 7200RPM HD has 8MB of cache. Just one thing to consider, not sure what that does though, but i noticed it when i was looking at options when buying mine.

I think its wise to look other places for RAM to see if its cheaper (WATCH THE SPEED TOO! 333Mhz is what dell gives you, I don't know if you can get faster or not) its a piece of cake to put in, so don't worry about that. Some games use a lot of RAM like Sim City 4, others don't. You should be safe with 512MB but a gig or more would be best if you're a serious gamer and that can get pretty costly at dell.

 

I just bought an 8600 myself and am waiting for it to arrive.

I would have to agree with the people here that said to buy the minimum RAM from Dell and go to Newegg.com for more. I just got a stick of 512MB 333mhz Corsair RAM there for $118 and free shipping. Great site.

One other thing--you said you were thinking of upgrading the processor later? I don't know if you can do that in the 8600 or not. I went with the 1.8Ghz Pentium M mostly because it has twice as much L2 cache as the cheaper ones, and will therefore be able to keep up a lot longer.

 

From what ive seen you just need to get a bios flash and then you can put the dothan cpu right onto the other motherboard. If the prices ever come down and I need more power i would do that. Although by the time I need anything else I would likely get a desktop.