a piece of advice

i ordered two laptops with the following setups:

laptop 1:
intel core 2 duo 1.6 (fsb 533)
2 gig ram (533)
80 hd 7200
ati 1400

laptop 2:
intel core 2 duo 2.06 (fsb 667)
2 gig ram (677)
80 hd 7200
ati 1400

i was gonna give one to my younger brother but i decided to install some stuff on it. Anyway i ended using both laptops for couple of weeks.
i did not notice any improvement when using laptop 2, even when using CAD and dvd ripping. But the upgrade from hd 5400 to hd 7200 was noticeable.

anyway now i feel the extra $125 i spend on the cpu and ram on laptop #2 was not really worth it while the extra $ 100 i spend on laptop 1 ( hd 7200 instead of 5200) was worth it. Just a word of advice for budget concious fellow buyers who want to get the max bang for buck.

 

What did you use to baseline an 80GB 5400RPM hard drive?

 

For daily day-to-day works T5600 is more than enough. So it make sense to upgrade other components of your lappy than upgrading CPU.

RAM (1 GB is sufficient, get 2 GB is possible, but make sure its a 667Mhz one),
HDD (get a 7200 rpm drive instead of 5400 rpm one)
GFX card (get the best option possible. This is one component you won't change much)

Upgrading these will result overall better performance rather than upgrading your CPU. :smile:

 

For processor intensive applications there should be a difference between the two processors given the 400MHz speed difference and the 2MB additional cache. I don't know how you measured performance under CAD, but for DVD ripping (if you mean encoding to DivX) then there has to be a difference. However it may not be as obvious as the HDD difference, but there is a difference nonetheless.

Are you sure you are comparing a T5500 and a T7200 ? and not a Core 2 Duo T5500 with a Core Duo T2500 (2.06GHz) ??

 

I suggest you try PCMark05 or [even better] try to convert MP3 and stuff.In that case the difference will be noticeable.