P8700 vs T9800

I'm configuring a FW390 CTO and mainly stuck on the processor speed.

The new P8700 at 2.53GHz or T9800 at 2.93 for an extra $450 more.

Is it worth it?

 

What're you doing with the machine? For day to day applications, you won't see much improvement in performance, but you should see significantly better battery life with the P8700.

 

Work, Multimedia, Web designing... I think the question is what am I NOT doing with the laptop. I probably won't be playing video games on the laptop.

Where will I see improvement in performance?

 

If multimedia includes a lot of video or even audio work, you probably will get some benefit out of the T9800. For everything else the P8700 is probably the better choice, though. Even with gaming, you're going to be GPU limited rather than CPU limited with a P8700.

 

go for the p8700... it still has excellent performance, and i wouldnt even consider paying $450 more for 0.4ghz and a 10W higher TDP. So no the t9800 is not worth it.

if you really want it buy it from here and save yourself a hundred dollars.... you can even sell the current p8700 for around $130

 

You can do CPU processor changes in a laptop? Is it easy or difficult?

 

Most of the time you can. It's just LV and ULV machines where you usually can't.

 

Although there are no scores as yet for the processors you mentioned in this COMPARISON OF MOBILE PROCESSORS (CPU BENCHMARKS) if you take a rough guess that their scores would be in between the CPU's that are sitting either side, this would give you a score of T9800 = 2730 odd compared to the P8700 = 2160, thats an increase of approximately 21%.

If you're getting paid for how much you do and this 21% difference equals doing your work 21% faster or there abouts, then the extra $450 seems a good investment.

But if you’re like most of us who surf the web visiting dubious site and editing materials from these dubious sites, the $450 would best spent on optometrist.

 

the chips are very similar... both are penryns.. have a 1066mhz fsb.. the 3mb extra cache on the t9800 will make very little difference, as intel processors use the cache very inefficiently. so 2.933 / 2.533 x 100 = the t9800 will be about 16% faster. i personally would never pay $450 for 16% (especially since performance will really only be improved in cpu intensive applications), but if you really think you need this power ( which i am quite certain you don't - the p8700 is more than enough for 99% of users right now ), and you're uncomfortable upgrading the processor yourself, go for it
hope this helps