How fast is Core 2 Duo?

I've been using low-end laptops and computers for my whole life. I used a Pentium 3 desktop until 2 years ago.

My laptop, which is two years old, Toshiba Satellite M45 has a Pentium D 1.7 Ghz and 512mb ram.

My Hp desktop with a AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ running at 2.4 GHz with 1 GB ram and Vista. It has a Nvidia Geforce 6150 LE. The gaming performance sucks. Its so bad that my laptop with integrated graphics has better gaming. No new games will run. This computer was slow as hell. I was looking forward to a quick computer, but this desktop can only barely multi-task. Whenever, I use Windows Media Center, it always takes like 10 seconds to load the menu and load thumbnails for the videos.

Now I recently bought a Dell Vostro 1500 laptop with a Core 2 Duo T7500 2.2 Ghz with 3Gb Ram running vista. It also has a Nvidia Geforce 8600M GT.



My question is, how much of a difference am I going to see in my new laptop? Will it be quick or will it face the same problems my desktop did with Windows Media Center. How much better will the gaming performance be with the 8600GT?

 

It will be much faster. It should easily be able to handle the newest games at mid-high settings and even future DX10 games at low-mid settings.

 

You only wait 10 seconds!? Man, it takes me two minutes to wait for the Start menu to appear after I click it!


Well, let me put it this way. Jet Plane = Pentium III. Jet Plane gets added onto an intergalactic space-traveller. This traveller has the ability to split in two ships of the SAME speed, (which would be light speed x 1000) so they can multitask. Then they go to workshops to have their engines boosted up. And then they get some more speed-mods, so they can fly super fast and go blow up asteroids and they go boom boom boom!

That's how fast your Core 2 Duo will be.

 

I will be rather insanely quick.

The problem with Vista is that it requires at least 2GB of ram to run efficently or smoothly. 3GB will be perfect for gaming. I have 2 gigs and BF2142 crashes after 1 hr of gameplay (ram was at 97% usage).

Mike.

 

Wow, I have no idea why you crash after playing. That shouldn't be happening, even in Vista. You only really need 1.5GB for any game in Vista. 768 for OS, 768 for game. That might even be a bit overboard for the game. I have 512mb DDR RAM (not DDR2) and if it weren't for my Ti 4200, I would be able to run the game pretty well.

 

Double post.

You might want to check into your heat. Clean out your fans, maybe.

 

Yeah, but what resolution are you playing at? 1600x1200 with everything on HIGH and 4xAA.

Heck, Oblivion uses over 1GB in XP (I don't play this game but that's what most people say).

Edit: My 7900GTX idles @ 40C and doesn't get any higher than 49C. My CPU is around 42C during gameplay.

Mike.

 

how about media center?

will it lag like it does on the AMD?

 

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ running at 2.4 GHz with 1 GB ram and Vista, that CPU has some speed and should have all the speed needed for most apps. 1GB RAM could be slowing things down you did not mention HDD but that could have an effect on the load speed. The Video card is a big step up. I suspect the new system if you add extra 1GB RAM will run much faster and smoother but not so much because of CPU. For everyone out there I know the C2D 2.2Ghz is much much faster than AMD 4600 but most apps won't stress either.

 

If it's crashing because it ran out of RAM to use, that sounds like a memory leak. i.e., a bug.

 

is there a program which lets me check the speed of the hard drive?

 

HD Tach http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach
Will tell you MB/s and seek time.

 

That, along with Vista, is holding your desktop back performance wise pretty badly. 1GB ram you can get away with, but Vista has some options enabled by default that really suck up the ram and slow you to a crawl.

 

massive difference!

 

Bah.. no no no. If it was a memory leak, then why the fook is everyone else having this issue on other games such as Stalker, FEAR, BF2, etc? It's because these games require 2GB of ram to run smooth but that's in XP. Vista already uses up 500MB+ and to add 1.3GB+ of game usage on top of that? Yeah, BSOD.

Mike.

 

So what would you guys recommend for a vostro 1500 with a intel core 2 duo running at 1.6ghz and a geforce 8600GT 256mb graphics card ? It's only coming with 1gb of ram but obviously I will upgrade that before any gaming but I don't know how much.

 

2 X 1GB w/work, or by a 2GB and w/one of your 512MB you w/have 2.5GB. But when they are the same size and speed the run faster.

 

Yeah pretty much all new mobo's support the dual channel right ? So that means I would be pretty much better off just getting 2 1gb sticks I guess huh ?

 

I say yes but people are going to disagree.

 

core 2 duo is ****ing fast!!!

 

I sure hope 2gb is enough. I think that's what I am going to do since I most likely won't spend anymore on ram after that. I haven't kept up on computers since a little while after I built my last one and then 512 was a good ammount to have!

 

Anyone know how much the Core 2 Duos compare with the Athlon 64 X2's?

I personally have a X2 3800+ and am wondering if there is a difference between that and the T7300 in my ordered IFL90.

 

As everyone is mentioning, a Core 2 Duo CPU will be much, much faster.

 

The T7300 will indeed be more powerful.

 

I just got my Vostro (specs in the sig). My desktop is an AMD X2 4400+ with 2 gb ram (1 x 1gb, 2 x 512) & a 7600GT. The only difference is my desktop is running a 320gb 7200rpm drive and the laptop is running a 5400rpm drive. Although games look better and perform better on my laptop, my desktop system is pretty much faster in any other tasks I perform and is a bit more smoother when multitasking.

 

dude.... get a video card for your desktop. I have a 7900gt in mine, and all the other specs are worse than yours(except the memory), and it still runs everything better than my brand new laptop with the 8600m gt.

 

I just bought a desktop with Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM, nvidia 8600GT, and Vista Home Premium, and it runs very smoothly and quick. With Aero.

 

C2D is much faster.

You will not see any significant improvement with dual channel, I recommend 3GB on Win XP 32bit, vista is not mature enough right now.

About game crash under vista, If your game requires more than the RAM remaining, it will not make your computer crash, it will use a pagefile. If your game crashes, its most likely because of a memory leak, but not necessarily in the game.

 

The laptop is better for games? Considering the advantage desktop cards have over mobile ones I would have thought they would be pretty equal! Might the smoothness be XP over Vista?

 

I have them both running Vista right now. 8600m GT vs. 7600GT in the desktop. The mobile card seems to be producing much better graphics and higher resolutions but for some reason theres a bog in this system somewhere thats slowing it down, can't find it.

 

5400 rpm hard disk? Another thing could be the single hard drive in a laptop getting more fragmented and full of 'stuff' than multiple well organised hard disks on a desktop? A seperate hard disk for data storage such as photos, videos, music and files used for encoding etc. greatly increases the lucidity of any machine.

Could that be it?

 

That could be. I havent defragmented yet although I have 2 80gb partitions on the laptop. I'll defrag it and see what performance gains I can get. It does seem like the hard drive is constantly working in Vista so the games get choppy for a bit every once and a while.

 

I noticed that in Vista,the hard drive working to the extent that sometimes the whole machine ground to a halt! That was on 1Gb ram though. Even with 2GB the hard disk seems to be always accessed. Possibly something to do with superfetch?

 

slower than a snail. i cant even get it past a few miles per hour without outside assistance!

 

How can you disable superfetch?

 

Why disable superfetch?

 

Just to see if taking a load off the hard drive has any impact

 

I hated SuperFetch, that's why I took it off my installation disc.

Mike.

 

I'm not sure how you disable it, but to answer why you might disable it, some have found it bogs the computer down by constantly using a lot of ram, hard disk and system resources in general. I for one would not find it useful as I keep the same applications open all the time and only close them when i shut down.

 

KillaHaZe, the problem for your desktop is not about the CPU, but memory and video card. You can't expect vista to run fast with 1GB RAM and using Geforce 6150LE to play current mainstream 3D games is slow no matter what CPU you are using.

If you don't want to spend $1000 on a new laptop, simply spend $300 on a new video card and more RAM, switch back to Windows XP, then your desktop will run most of the 3D games on the market.

 

Laptop? New video card? I am not getting something here?

 

That's how I use my system 95% of the time. I really would like to see the difference in disabling superfetch.

Do you know why when you install Vista, the hard drive works like crazy for the 1st 2 or 3 days and then quiets down considerably afterwards?

 

The HD works like crazy during the first few days because Vista is still indexing your hard drive which enables faster searches.

 

Cool, I thought it was looking for credit card information.

 

I was talking about KillaHaZe's desktop.

 

It'll be Very fast. It's likely faster than the corresponding desktop allendale in performance (same clockfrequency, same FSB, more L2 cache in the Merom).

So superfetch was the reason my computer stuttered (and harddrive usage was very much). I thought it was indexing, and tried turning it off (I wasn't 100% successful)

 

Romanian you kinda reminded me of a star trek voyager eppsiode... >.< must start watching SPACE agian

 

CPU wise the T7500 should perform similar to that X2 4600+