Questioning which DV 2000 to get

I see that Best Buy has a deal on the DV 2315 for $749 with TL-52, 1 GB memory, 160 GB HDD. I can configure one at HP.com for $1070 with APP with T5600, 2GB memory and Go 7200. Which would give me better performance for school for the next two years. I am an engineering student and the only things that I want on the laptop is XP Pro, Office, Maple, ZoneAlarm, and Roxio or Nero. Anyone have any good reason to choose one over the other???? Really need to act quick as I am falling behind on homework......

 

I'd go ahead and get the one at HP...... the extra RAM you'll want anyway, the dedicated GPU will be helpful, and the CPU should give you better performance, cooler operation and better battery life.

 

Would it be better to buy the one from Best Buy and upgrade the memory. That would be cheaper. Secondly, does anyone have definite results that I will see an obvious benefit of the C2D over the Turion X2??

 

If you read through the site's more recent reviews, you'll see the C2D smashing the X2 in the performance department.

 

How about getting the one from Best Buy and upgrade the memory. That is a cheaper option. I'm a student on somewhat of a budget. Is there anyone with real benefits of C2D over TurionX2? Most of what I have read has been people's opinion, I think.

 

Yes, you will see an obvious benefit. As night_2004 said, the C2D is going to be superior in almost all areas of importance (battery life, performance and CPU temps).

Once you factor in the cost of buying additional RAM (I'm also not sure if the model at Best Buy has 2 512 meg sticks or 1 1GB stick.... if it is 2 512 meg sticks, it will be even more expensive to upgrade it to 2GB), plus whatever local tax you might have to pay, the cost savings don't strike me as worth it.

 

I had the Turion version and returned it to Costco because it was somewhat slow. I was only running XP too, I can imagine it's even slower with Vista. I have a C2D version on order, like the other posters said, it seems to be much faster than Turion.

 

The Best Buy deal is a good deal (though it may be a clearance offer, as HP no longer shows the AMD-based models on their website any longer). But given the additional memory, and fairly significant speed boost of the C2D, it's really hard not to recommend the custom-configured system.

Since you asked for a benchmark of some kind, here you go.

SuperPi Results (to 2 million places):

TL-52: 1 minute, 57 sec.
T5600: 1 minute, 16 sec.

Now, that's a somewhat extreme example of the speed difference, as it is obviously maxing out the processor, and possibly the cache as well... but it definitely shows the potential difference between the two processors.

I know what it's like to be a student on a budget, but the real question is how long do you want the system to last? A processor is not really a user-upgradeable part on a notebook PC. So, IMO, better to be ahead of the curve on that than behind it.

 

Yeah, C2D is really worth it, as you get nearly an hour more battery life. I'm in the same boat as the original poster, and I was pumped up when I found the coupon for custom built systems. But it was used so much HP ended it early. "People are using the coupon? End it now!"

 

Thanks to all for your help. Made my decision a simple. Ordering today. I even thought about the t7200 upgrade, but decided against it. I will do math related programs, Maple and MatLab, on it and they run on an Athlon XP 2500+ so they should be able to run on t5600 with 2GB of mem.

 

MaxSQ -- glad we could help... even if we did talk you into a more expensive system. But I think you'll be VERY happy you spent the extra money in the long run -- the dv2000t's are really great system, and those are nice specs.

 

You're an engineer student so spending extra money on your laptop won't be a waste. You'll be glad that you have bought it since you'll run some "heavy duty" software some day. Eight years from now, your laptop still running, not crawling like the other one.

 

8 years from now the CPU would probably be in the 16 or beyond core processor. Softwares of today will be obsolete then. What you have to deal with is now and as far as speed goes, the C2D wins. The quad cores are coming out hopefully soon and hopefully not x86 compatable so we can get into serious computing/programming.