Penryn 1st Gen vs Montevina?

Hi people.. i was just wondering since I already ordered a notebook with a T9300, what will be the major *noticeable* differences beteen Penryn 1st gen and the new Montevina (Penryn 2nd gen) appart from better battery life?

I mean, during normal usage, will I notice some real improvements?? I know Montevina will have 1066mhz FSB but even now with 800mhz FSB notebooks still comes with 667mhz memorys. I'm planning to update my memory to 800mhz modules whenever i feel the need (i'm not a power user, just surf the web, do some office job and sometimes do photoshop edditing) but if Montevina will be a huge *noticeable* improvement maybe I could switch in a year?

Thanks!

 

you'll not notice the difference when you're doing simple tasks like that

 

Yeah I agree. In my experience, I only notice an improvement in 500mhz steps. I.e., I can really see the difference between 1.5ghz and 2.0ghz. In my opinion, the improvements between generations of chips aren't enough to hold back on a purchase unless it's right around the corner.

There can be sort of a frustrating feeling in the back of your mind, knowing your new computer has been "obsoleted" by the next generation of tech six months later. But in reality the machines perform almost exactly the same. If you try to switch every year you're on the expensive upgrade treadmill. You should be able to upgrade every 3 years, depending on what you use the machine for.

 

In fact that's what I think InlawBiker, even so, the Penryn 1st gen is only 10% faster "at much" when compared to the previous generation chip so, I guess I'll switch to *whatever plattform is on the market* in 3 years or so. Maybe and just maybe I can do a mid-life update ith the memory but hey, if battery life is the only real "major" update (my Penryn's got SSE4 too so that's not big deal and even so I don't think there could be a lot of difference when compared to SSE3) then I guess It's not much of a big deal =]

 

Honestly performance wise, the most benefits with Montevina will be in the memory. Not only will it be DDR3 (not that DDR3 is necessarily faster than DDR2, especially if they start out at DDR3-800 memory speeds like I think they will, even if the bus is 1066mhz), but the memory controller is updated from the 965 chipset - and yields somewhere around 10-15% increase in performance by itself not considering the DDR2 to DDR3 upgrade. That, at least to me, would be the most significant upgrade. But no I don't think it's worth it if you have a Penryn now, especially a 6mb one.