T7100 to T7300 or 5400 rpm hd to 7200 rpm hd?

Hey, which would you guys choose: 1) T7100 to T7300 or 2) 120 gb HD 5400 rpm to 7200 rpm or 3) skip both. The price difference is $50 for either move in the configuration of the hp 8510p. Which would you guys choose for word processing / occasional gaming if you only had $50? By the way, what would be a reasonable estimate of the heat difference if the hard drive speed was increased? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Skip both.

Your GPU is the main bottleneck for gaming. An extra 200 mhz and 2mb of cache won't have a dramatic effect. A 7100 will be plenty fast. (See 1.5ghz Core 2 Duo with 8600GT benchmarks)

A faster RPM hard drive would just make installs and load times shorter. There might be a appreciable heat difference but I'm not sure.

 

I would get T7300 but you will be fine with or without.

 

I would take both for $100.
Your cpu willl have double the cache at 4mb
And your HDD will be much faster

 

Thanks for the quick replies, but I made a mistake. I was supposed to write t7250 to t7300 in the title. So it is probably even less worth it then with just the 2mb to 4mb cache difference.

 

T7300 still

 

The faster HD will be the best upgrade.

 

If you can only afford one then get the hard drive as RogueMonk mentioned. The hard drive is the slowest component in your computer and therefore any increase in speed is going to be noticeable.

 

Definitely go down the HD route. The main difference between the two processors is the 2MB of cache which is somewhat negligible. Load times will be quicker and there isn't any significant heat gains or noise for that matter with the bump up in RPM, though you may loose a few minutes of battery power ...again very negligible.

 

Well since you posted after Chaz I will too. Is the FSB going to be faster with T7300? If so I would stick with T7300. I think the extra cache is nice. The HDD is easier to upgrade later if needed. The T7300 may actualy save battery life. Also in gaming even though the GPU is the most important in the pecking order I would say CPU is next. It is all opinion so that is mine, good luck.

 

Yeah, I forget to specify ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_(CPU_architecture) ):

T7250: 2.0ghz core 2 duo, 800 FSB, 2mb L2 cache
T7300: 2.0ghz core 2 duo, 800 FSB, 4mb L2 cache

So the FSB is the same speed between the T7250 and T7300. How much of a difference would that cache make?

 

I miss read I kept reading T5250 but I was wrong, 7250 is going to be fast enough. And even though Chaz and the Monk would go HDD I would go CPU. It doesn't mean I think I'm right, it is just what I would do.

 

I would go for CPU, mainly because HDD is easy to replace and in year or two you could get SSD for example.

 

As a few people have said, the hard disk is the upgrade to go for. The processors will perform very similar in games, and an increase in L2 cache will only be seen in some processor dependant applications. The ahrd disk upgrade, on the other hand, will have a much more noticible performance increase, such as faster start up times, and faster loading of games.

 

Yay, phew. Good thread.

I thought I made a mistake in going 7200RPM 160GB + BT MODULE + 100USD discount over T7400 to T7600 (if I did make a mistake, please refrain from telling me and let me stay in my bubble )

Thinking about it now, I really should have just upped both. Oh well.