Core 2 Duo worth a price premium over Core Duo?

I'm looking to upgrade the CPU in my laptop. Currently I have a Core Duo T2300E (1.66ghz) and would like something a bit faster. The two processors I've considered are the Core Duo T2600 and the Core 2 Duo T7400, both 2.16ghz. These processors seem to perform quite similar in benchmarks, however the Core 2 seems to command quite a price premium. Are there any major advantages to the Core 2 processors or would I be paying more for little gain?

 

depends on what you are doing. if you just use your laptop for general use, nothing processor intensive, you wont notice any difference

 

I sometimes notice it gets bogged down on websites that are flash intensive but otherwise I just use it for fairly light tasks.

 

then it may not be worth upgrading? especially since it sounds like an older machine. other parts may start giving out soon

 

Depends on the clock and your laptop. Theoretically it should all be supported or after a BIOS flash it should work. Core 2 Duo should yield higher performance for the same clock speeds, but more heat.

 

forget the T2*00 series for the upgrade since the T5*00 and T7*00 series CPUs are significantly faster.

I went from a T2500 to a T7200 passing by a T5300. The T5300 although 2 x 1.73GHz was already faster than the T2500 @ 2 x 2.0GHz.

Have you thought about getting a T5500 or a T5600? they are cheaper than T7*00 CPUs. The best value for money on the T7*00 is the T7200

 

You're right, it's a 5 year old machine, however it seems to be holding up well. If the motherboard died then I'd give up but most other components I could replace myself. I know that hard drives are prone to failure but I've recently upgraded mine to an SSD so I don't expect that to fail any time soon.

It looks like the T7200 is actually cheaper than the T2600 so that may be a good bet. I could potentially get one used for £35, compared to £45 for the T2600. Is it faster, despite being clocked 166mhz lower?

 

yes...


you can also look into the t7600, it is the fastest cpu that will work with socket M laptops...

 

depends on what you pay for it....

But $100- spent on upgrading a 5 year old machine is $100- you won't have available to spend on a brand new machine. You might be surprised what you can get in the $500 to $700 range by shopping around a bit.

 

core 2 duo has x64 sets, core duo does not. i also believe core 2 duo has bigger cache sizes. in short, yes, its worth the premium.

 

You're right the T7*00 series has 4 MB L2 cache while the T2*00 has only 2 MB L2 cache. The T5*00 has 2 MB L2 cache too. The T7*00 and T5*00 are 64bit while the T2*00 are 32bit only. So basically the T7*00 and T5*00 can run both a 32 and 64 bit OS while the T2*00 can run only a 32 bit OS. The memory that can be addressed by the T7*00 and the T5*00 is larger than the memory that can be addressed by the T2*00 which is limited to 4GB max. Please note that I doubt that the OP laptop can handle more that 4GB RAM even with a Core 2 Duo CPU. The limitation here is due to the chipset and not the CPU.

The T5*00 and T7*00 are significantly faster than the T2*00. The T2*00 (Core Duo) were basically two Pentium M put together on the same wafer. The T5*00 and the T7*00 (Core 2 Duo) are much faster because they are not 2 Pentium M put together. Core 2 Duo architecture is a drastic improvement over the Core Duo architecture; for instance the two core have been optimised and merged together to enhance the communication between them.

I had a T7200 and sold it a while ago for £30. If you take your time I'm certain that you can buy one in ebay for £30 or less.

As I said I went from a T2500 to a T7200 (actually the gateway laptop I had at the time started its life with a Celeron M 430 ). In my case the T7200 was about 7-8c hotter than the T2500 at full load.

If I may:
Did you consider selling your laptop? I sold a Lenovo C200 with a T2300, 2 GB and an 80GB harddrive in ebay for £120 + postage (Buy it now price) last June. That was about £105 net profit. It doesn't sound a lot but it is when you consider the following:

£105 is more than enough to buy you an Advent 9115 from ebay. I saw some selling for around £90. The Advent 9115 has a Pentium Dual Core 2310 clocked at 1.46Ghz which despite its low clock happens to be as fast as your T2300. Sandra shows the T2310 faster than the T2300. The Advent comes with a 2GB of RAM and 160 GB HDD. The screen is 15.4" wide.

Why am I recommending the Advent 9115?
1- It uses a SIS GPU which is faster than the Intel i945.
2- It can be pin modded. With a DDR2 PC4200, the T2310 can be be pin modded to run safely at 2.2GHZ by rising its FSB from 133 to 200. The mod is safe and revertible. Check my sig for details .
3- The T2310 @ 2.2GHz is as fast as a T7300, and the T7300 is faster than the T7200.
4- If you don't want to pin mod you can buy the T7300 (2x2GHz, 4MB L2 cache, 800MHz FSB) for about £15. This is half the price of the T7200.
5- For the price you're selling your old laptop you can buy a newer one and upgrade it

The only things that you might not like are that the Advent has one memory slot and that the battery capacity is only 2200mh

 

I would invest $100 if I was planning to use the old machine for 1+ yr(s). Anytime sooner is not worth IMO.


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OP - check your CPU usage via the Task Manager. Watch the CPU graph during the times your computer slows down. If it's 80%+ usage for a consistent period of time, then yes you are CPU bottlenecked and a CPU upgrade would be beneficial.

What are the other specs of your computer? RAM/hard drive?

Also check your RAM usage via the Task Manager. If it is more than 70% of what you have consistently, then a RAM upgrade would do a lot for your performance. It might be RAM that's the issue, not the CPU.

 

That's the beauty of Flash.

On everyone of my laptops my PC's I always suffer on Flash heavy sites and I just turn off Javascript, it's annoying. I hate trying to read something and there's animation or videos everywhere distracting me from reading.

 

Ya beauty of flash, explains why YouTube is going to Silverlight!

Flash is a major battery life killer also, running No Script usually solves that problem!

 

Microsoft Silverlight might help from a performance perspective, but it still has the same problem where one technology vendor (Microsoft, Adobe) wants the entire internet to adopt their proprietary standard.

 

Why am I recommending the Advent 9115?
1- It uses a SIS GPU which is faster than the Intel i945.
2- It can be pin modded. With a DDR2 PC4200, the T2310 can be be pin modded to run safely at 2.2GHZ by rising its FSB from 133 to 200. The mod is safe and revertible. Check my sig for details .
3- The T2310 @ 2.2GHz is as fast as a T7300, and the T7300 is faster than the T7200.
4- If you don't want to pin mod you can buy the T7300 (2x2GHz, 4MB L2 cache, 800MHz FSB) for about £15. This is half the price of the T7200.
5- For the price you're selling your old laptop you can buy a newer one and upgrade it


thats great as i just bought one and would like to try to pin mod mine
so how do I check your sig...........dont even know what that means.
pls help