T5600 or T7200

I have been looking at the two and need to ask if the T7200 is worth the extra $100 in a dv2000t. I will be using this laptop for photoshop, but not high-res professional work and I will be playing a few games on it. I'll be maxing out the ram to 2 gigabytes so I'm not sure if the extra bit the T7200 gives is worth it.

Thanks

 

If you encode or video edit, then the processor is recommened, as it will perform better in those tasks, because of the higher clockspeed and to some degree larger L2 cache. Games are limited by the graphics card, and even a T5600 can game very well. The T7200 does sit in the best price to performance band, and it will not let you down in almost all circumstances.

 

As Zero has mentioned, you won't probably notice a big difference between the two chips doing PS work or gaming. However, if you ever plan to go into editing/encoding you'll appreciate the extra power. A hundred dollars isn't much money, but if you're strapped for cash (teehee) you will be fine with the T5600. As you already know, memory and hard disk speed will give a bigger performance boost for the money.

 

Yes its worth more than $100!

 

Unless you plan to do processor intensive tasks like encoding or compiling I would say no it's not worth the extra money.

 

Are both the T5600/7200 faster than my desktop AMD X2 4200? Any idea?

Anyway, I do 3d animation so use my computer for rendering, if i decide to get a notebook it is to supplement my desktop which i'm quite happy with. How large a performance gap is it between the T5600 & T7200? Is it a little bit faster or a lot? USD$100 is equal to 400-450 when I buy here in my country.

 

The two processors in question, should be about the same in terms of performance, with them being a little faster, and the T7200 probably performing the fastest. The difference in speed of the T5600 and T7200 is vast, if you main tasks are to encode and video edit, as those tasks are much more processor dependant. Gaming will be about the same on both, because it is limited by the graphics card. Finally, tasks like surfing the website, and general work within Windows is the same on both processors.

 

Tom's Hardware has CPU charts which compare CPU performance for many different applications. Unfortunately, the charts only cover desktop CPUs so you would need to extrapolate the desktop C2D results to approximate to the T7200. I'm fairly confident that you would find the T7200 to be at least as fast as the X2 4200.

John

 

Compared to an Athlon 64 FX-60 desktop processor, the Intel Core 2 Duo T7600 (2.33GHz - fastest model available in a laptop) is ever so slightly faster in brute power. I would say that the T7200 is definitely as fast or faster than the Athlon X2 4200+.

 

Yeah I do work with that multimedia stuff, 3d/video rendering. hhmm...I'm eyeing two laptops, the Asus A8Je (t7200 + plus overall slightly higher specs than my second choice which is...) and HP nx8420 (t5600, better vid card, much better build). Such difficult choices.

Thanks for the replies.