i5 450m vs i5 540m

Am looking for a new laptop after the dreadful throttling problem with the alienware machines. I heard great things about the sager NP8690. I am looking to buy from xotic and there are upgrade options for the cpu. I cant afford the i7 mobility chips so im down to the i5's. The sager comes stock with the i5 450m but is it worth spending an extra $100 upgrading to the i5 540? Looks like just a freq inc to me. Opinions please

 

Only if you run Virtual Machines would that upgrade be worth it

 

So in gaming they would be the same right?

 

the 540 has a 133mhz Bclck advantage and 400mhz turbo clockspeed advantage. It's a big upgrade.

the 540 will be faster, if it were 133mhz it wouldn't make a difference, but there's a 400mhz difference . The 540 also has a DMI speed twice that of the 450.

 

It's a crapshoot without us knowing what you want to do with the notebook.

Off the bat I will say that for everyday apps/office productivity, there will be no perceivable difference between the processors. For just about every game I can think of, the performance difference will be unnoticeable. If someone has benchmarks that show otherwise, then I will stand corrected.

 

I will use the laptop for gaming only. I'm getting mixed opinions from people, some telling it it will be huge others telling me it will b minimal. Problem is i dont really look at benchies cause they dnt reflect true in game performance

 

the 540M can up clock much higher than the 450M, it's going to be noticeable in single threaded applications and still faster in multi-threaded applications. Whether the difference is noticeable in the games you play is debatable, however in low powered GPU laptops faster cpu's matter more, the difference may be between 20FPS (choppy) and 24-25FPS (visually smooth) or it might not.. Benchmarks will tell you that sort of information, however without knowing specifically what games to look for and finding laptops that have the same GPU you're going to get with the 450/540 processor, it's a guess. That sort of information is severally limited anyway. The 540 Is clocked faster, significantly, that's the only fact that can be confirmed.

 

Hmm still cant decide if its worth spending $100 on that cpu. Do u think it will make a big impact on bad company 2?

 

if money is an issue just get the 450m as most games are gpu bound.
as lozz mentioned, cpu speed speed may be more of a factor for lower end gpu's and i dont think the 450m is 'slow' enough to bottleneck the 5870mr or the 285m.
you can then upgrade the cpu to a core i7 quad when you have the money and when prices drop. just make sure you get the pm55 chipset.

 

Put that $100 towards a GPU upgrade or something. I don't think that you'll see a huge difference between the two processors in games like you would with a different GPU.

 

Just looking at the specifications of the two CPUs, I sincerely doubt there will be a noticeable difference - certainly not one worth $100. Go with the 450M.

What are the rest of the specifications of the notebook?

 

False. The 450 has a DMI of 4.8 GT/s (or whatever the measurements are) and the 540 has a DMI of 2.5 GT/s