Differences b/w 1.6Ghz, 1.83Ghz, 2Ghz

Hey guys,

Im looking for a laptop but I have to stick to a pretty conservative ~$1,300 budget. Is there a large difference in performance for these three speeds in a Intel Dual Core processor. I will be using it in law school for work and some light gaming.

Thanks

 

Spend the money on a faster hard drive or more memory as you'll get more bang there.

 

so the high speed doesn't matter THAT MUCH? I'm comtemplating on either a 1.6 or a 1.8. However, I will do gaming on it. counter strike source mostly. but the lappy will have a x1600 256mb dedicated vid card.... and 1 gb ram

 

The 1.66Ghz core duo will do you fine. BTW, what laptop are you getting with these specs for $1,300?

 

Yup, the 1.66 ghz Core Duo (T2300) is a very able processor. That being said, the T2400 and T2500 are even more able. Like anything else, if you can afford it and want to spend the money on it...go for a faster CPU.

As was said, though, go with a faster HD and 1gb RAM before a faster cpu.

 

Think of things in this order:

HDD, CPU, then RAM.

I put CPU before RAM, because RAM can easily be upgraded later; CPU takes much more work.

A 1.66Ghz Core Duo will do fine at anything except heavy video encoding and CAd rendering, in which case, you need to be using a desktop anyway.

 

i think he may be looking at the asus s96j at geared2play.com and rjtech.com

 

about what comparable speed is the 1.66 Core Duo to a Pentium 4?

 

It's better to look at it as percentage increases in performance. The T2400 is at most 10% faster while the T2500 is at most 20% faster. However, this only becomes noticable when the processors are already running at 100% utilisation. For the majority of applications you will not notice a difference with such subtle clock speed differences and it will probably never make the difference between being able to run a program and not being able to run a program. It will, however, reduce the time taken to run a long task such as video encoding by approximately the percentage clock speed increase, so a 60 minute encoding with the T2300 will become about 54 minutes with the T2400. Real world results will probably be less. Basicly it's only worth it if you do a lot of encoding type tasks that take a long time to complete.

 

Thanks guys!

I only plan to use it for word processing, light gaming, and listening to music. I dont think there is video encoding in my future, lol.

 

I actually have the exact same question, and have everything maxed out from 2 retailers (except for the cpu and ram for about $1500). I wanted to know if 2 gigs of ram and 2 ghz core duo would be that much better than a 1.83 ghz 1 gig. Btw, tha laptop is the asus s96j and I'm gettin the barebones (with ram) from gentech and the hdd, cpu, and windows mce from zipzoomfly (can anyone vouch for these guys?; only picking them cuz they accept paypal).

 

Zipzoomfly is an excellent place to order from, 2nd only to newegg in my opinion.

 

newegg also accepts paypal.

 

I know newegg is great, and since I live in state, shipping is usually one day. Problem is, when i'm buying expensive pc hardware like cpus and stuff, the tax is just not worth it. zipzoomfly has no tax out of cali and free ship, so its definitely worth ordering from there if they're good (for me at least).

 

I have the 1.66Ghz core duo, in Super Pi (which is single threaded) it still beats a 2.0 GHz Pentium M Dothan by about 10 Seconds (the 1.66Ghz got a 1:24, and that was with about 70 processes running), so this processor is good. With multitasking, I have not been able to get this thing to slip at all, It won't go down to its knees, try as I might.

 

Anyone have an answer to this? Benchmarks/personal test/whatever. Know i'm bein kinda pushy but me have to knowW!

 

it won't be that much better unless you spend hours doing video encoding and such.

 

and update drivers if theres a such.