This laptop at BestBuy

I was looking at this laptop from Bestbuy, I was wondering if anyone had any information on it...I was hoping for a review here somewhere but I couldn't find one.

Thanks
Will

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage...CategoryId=pcmcat64100050013&id=1125465158282

 

Allround, its a nice laptop. Although it'll have mediocre battery life, probably around 2 to 2:30 hours on the standard 6 cell battery. You can get an optional 12 cell battery which will give you twice that.

Actually, I recommend to you the Compaq V2335us being sold at CompUSA right now for the same price after rebates, here's the link.

http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=329223&pfp=10205sale

Its basically the exact same as the computer you listed above but has the Pentium M processor and will give you better performance and battery life. Plus, this one has 1 gig of ram instead of the 512
on the Turion model This computer will get around 3:30 to 4 hours on battery life with the standard 6 cell battery.

However, the Turion Compaq at Bestbuy will be slightly better at videogames, but still pretty poor. It'll also produce more heat and fan noise, but it is 64 bit, so its more future proof. But 64 bit won't be the standard in computing for at least a few more years, so the 32bit Pentium M should be fine.


Overall, I'd definately get the V2335us.

 

Wow, thanks for the fast response, I was on teh HP website customizing it and one of the options was to add 'productivity ports' for the video card? What does that mean?

 

I think you are better off buying it at HPShopiing.com. No tax and you can configure how you want, I'd recommend the 5400RPM hard drive and 12 cell battery.

http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/s...ooks/compaq_presario&storeName=computer_store

 

The "productivity ports" are a IEEE 1394 port, 6-in-1 Media Reader and an additional USB port. I would get those ports in case you ever need them, its only $25.

 

Which one will you get? The V2000 or V2000Z? I don't mean to bash on AMD, but I think the Pentium M processor you can configure in the V2000 is overall better than the Turion in the V2000Z. Right now, the Pentium M still gets better battery life and performance.

The thing is, there's two versions of the Turion ML and MT, HP uses the MLs right now. The ML's suck up more juice, giving you more heat, fan noise and less battery life than the MT version.
Does anyone know the cost difference between the ML and MT? I heard it was very small and also, what is the performance difference between the two? Does anyone know why AMD made the inferior ML version?

 

How does this

AMD Sempron(TM) 3300+ (2.0GHz/128KB L2 Cache

Compare to this

AMD Turion(TM) 64 ML-28 (1.6GHz/512KB L2 Cache)

Pretty much how does the cache compare to the speed? Which one would be more important to consider?

 

Just wondering, why don't you want to go with the Pentium M processor?

The cache is pretty important to performance, I don't know how much though. I can't tell which one of those 2 will be faster, but the Turion should run cooler.

 

The Sempron will be quite close to the Turion ML-28 in terms of performance. There might be some cases in which it will be slower(mostly cache intensive apps-gaming might be a good example). The influence of the cache is not as important as in Intel processors. Although more cache is always better. I would say if you dont need 64 bit instructions then the Sempron will be quite fast.

Oh and the battery life will be higher in the Sempron(not much) but the Semprons HP uses are of the low voltage variety(25W) compared to the Turion64 ML(35W)

Check out this review. They compare the Sempron with the Athlon64 with different caches. The Turions and the LV Semprons also belong to the same architecture(K8) so the same sort of performance differences can also be expected..
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/sempron-2600_5.html

 

I have V2000Z with ML-37, for browsing, downloading, text editing I am getting 3 hours at min brightness level with 6-Cell battery. Worst case scenario when I ran some bench marks I got 2:30.( I am not sure why anyone gets only 2hours unless there is some problem with old bios or particular laptop) I really liked this laptop. I would suggest you to go with 1MB cache version(ML-30, ML-34 or ML-37). When it is running in low stepping that will help.

Higher the model better the battery life.This is how
ML-28,ML-30 uses 32 watts at 1600Mhz
ML-32, ML-34 use 34 watts at 1800Mhz, but only use 28.1 watts at 1600Mhz
ML-37 uses 35watts at 2000Mhz, but only uses 24.2watts at 1600Mhz,
Better yet ML-40 use 35watts at 2200Mhz but only uses 20.2 watts 1600Mhz.
All these use 8 watts at 800Mhz.

http://www.mobilityguru.com/2005/08/30/the_turion_64_inside_story/page5.html

So, in typical usage processor may keep jumping between low 800 to 1600Mhz quite often than you would like, so that is where higher models gets benifit. And ofcourse you have more CPU power at your disposal when you need it.

Though Semprons have only 25watts, in typical usage pattern they consume similar to Turions as they have to jump to higher speeds more so than Turions.
And again 64bit compatibility is gone.

And as per graphics, ATI 200M is much/much better than Intel Integrated( I use Dell 600M at work with 1.7Ghz Pentium). On my V2000zmachine I can play Unreal at full resolution 1280x768 without any problems. It is as good ATI Radeon 7500 dedicated chips.

In the end you pay less for Turions. Ofcourse I wish HP used MT series Turion instead of ML, but I think it is production volume problem with AMD.

I was in same dilemma as you are in now, for quite sometime, finally I went with V2000Z and I am glad I did.

Either way you will like V2000 series I think. Screen is excellent, keyboard is good sized( unlike Dell 700m), slim and reasonbly light. For Turion With 12 cell you can expect 6 hours, but that adds Half-a-pound more. Best of luck, and let us know what you finally bought.

 

Intel chips are much more heavily dependent on L2 Cache than AMD. The larger cache size makes for a more powerful processor but less effecient, thus slower.

Anyway, I too am happy with my choice of AMD over Intel. Anyone still trying to decide should read the following article.

http://www.laptoplogic.com/resources/articles/42/1/1/