T500 - which processor

Hi,

I'm in to process of ordering a T500. Trying to decide which processor to get, 2.5ghz or 2.8?

I use my notebook as a desktop replacement, for many business app's, video editing, excel, word, publisher etc, little or no gaming, some entertainment/movie watching.

Would I notice any benefit to the 2.8 over the 2.5?

Will the 2.8 make the machine run hotter or make the fan run more?

Thanks in advance.

 

T9400 and T9600 ?

The price difference between the T9400 and the T9600 seems to be of $275, so upgrading to the T9600 is a definite no.

CPU usage:

Business apps - probably no
Video-editing - yes
excel - no
word - no
publisher - dunno (but i guess no)
movies - no

The T9600 will not run hotter than the T9400, as both have the same max power consumption.

But the price difference is too much, so stick with the T9400. Its good enough for all CPU intensive tasks, and provides the best bang for the buck. Difference b/w the two isn't much.

 

2.5 is good enough.

 

^ I agree, its not worth the money for only .3 GHz. which you will barely notice.

 

thanks, I wasn't sure, the sales rep really thought I should do it, but I wasn't completely sold.

 

hmmm... If you do lots of video editing you will notice a significant difference. but other than that 2.5 is fine. I ordered a 2.8Ghz partialy because I need a fast chip, the rest... well, mines faster than yours!!! lol

 

If you are worried about heat, noise, and/or battery life, then the P8600 might be a good choice. It is 2.4GHz and should provide very comparable performance at a lower price point. It is also only a 25w part as opposed to the 35w T series, and should reduce electricy usage, heat output, and consequently fan noise. I have it in my x200 and it is very fast for Vista, Office Applications, Video editors, games, etc. The main performance factors in office applications tend to be RAM and disk speed rather than raw CPU. I think the T series chips have a larger cache, but I am not sure of how this translates into actual performance.

 

I think for most people that answer would be no.

 

This might be a silly question but what kind of applications/uses do you think will max out the CPU? And will a maxed out T series perform significantly better (>20%) than the P series?

 

Applications that will max out the CPU is any application that depends heavily on clock cycles, is properly threaded (uses both cores), takes a long time to complete, runs independent of video hardware, and doesn't depend on a fast hard drive.

The number of applications that require this for any stretch of time are few and far between. The few applications that I have found that do this tend to be lossy video/audio transcoders (Handbrake, VirtualDub, MeGUI, Audacity, etc.), all of these will fill up at least one, and in some cases all, core(s) fully for 1 hour+ if you have a long media file. In these applications, encoding times may drop by 15-20% with a 2.8GHz versus a 2.4GHz processor (this adds up if you do a lot of long encodes). A lossless video editor in contrast, is usually bound by disk speed rather than the CPU, and thus would get little to no benefit.

Applying intense filters to a large image in Photoshop CS3 might also be dependent on clock speed for a large stretch of time, but its limiting factor tends to be RAM, and the new CS4 is hardware accelerated so the CPU may no longer be the bottleneck.

Most games and 3D renders (Maya, CAD, etc.) are bound first and foremost by the GPU. If you intend to use any of these, I would suggest getting the discrete option first, and only considering a CPU upgrade as a secondary option.

General office applications will be marginally faster, but you probably won't notice it. Most of these apps (MS Office, Firefox, etc.) use a full thread when they are thinking, but they generally are only require a few seconds on any modern processor to complete their task.

Video playback is also hardware accelerated now. I can play back 1080P AVC video at my slow processor setting (800 MHz per core) just fine.

Overall, I would say almost any CPU you can buy for the T400 will accomplish your tasks without issue. If you run a lot of tasks that take several hours to complete (A/V transcoding, filters on large images, etc.), then a faster processor makes sense. However, if your CPU on your current machine is not frequently at 100% (and able to hold it for long stretches), the gains you get from a faster processor are limited compared to the increased cost, heat, noise, and reduced battery life. Therefore, I think a P series chip is a very good choice if price, heat, noise, and battery life are something that concerns you (and why wouldn't they?).

 

I am not sure what would max it out, but I know that a lot of video encoding and intense compiling should hit the CPU pretty hard(i.e creating a Gentoo Linux system from a stage 3 tarball )

I am not sure what you mean by this. Are you talking about the previous generation T61 machines? The "p" version mainly had more powerful GPUs over the regular versions

 

Thanks for your input! Sorry if I was unclear about the T vs P - I meant the CPUs. The P8400 vs the T9400 for example.

I'm plugged in most of the time so power savings are not a huge concern. I'm trying to see if upgrading from the P8400 to the T9400 will provide enough of a speed increase to be worth the extra $150 or so. For everyday tasks ie browsing, word processing, it seems like I won't notice a difference. However, I do a bit of video encoding and simulation too so I think I will see a noticeable performance boost there. The only question is by how much?

 

Mobile Processor Benchmarks by Notebookcheck

From that, the T9600 is AT LEAST a 10% increase in performance over the T9400.. which really isnt worth $200 in my opinion.

 

I did a bit more searching and I found this benchmark site

From their results, it looks like the P8400 and T9400 are very similar in performance. That doesn't sound quite right.

But then again it agrees with the results from Notebookcheck. They found only a 10% difference between the P8400 and T9400. That leads me to ask: if the improvement is that minor, why would anyone upgrade? It seems like the marginal benefit isn't worth it.

 

You should remember that when you're running on battery power, the processor gets throttled to 800 MHz, so all the processors will run at the same speed when you're using the battery.

 

so 2.5 is the way I'm going to go, for $275 2.8ghz sure doesnt' sound worth it, why would they even offer it? Aside from the obvious 'cash grabbing' reasons

 

I remember the same kind of thing when I was configuring my T61p. They had the T9300 and the T9500 and the T9500 was about 200 to 300 Mhz faster than the T9300 and cost about $300 more. I had the same question and the answer I got back was because it was the fastest on paper. It was for people who wanted the latest and greatest at any cost.