T5500 or T7200 for $150 difference?

I am buying a Z61t for the future 3 years use. No game, no audio/video encoding... But iwll do multitask, like opening 15 windows with office programs, photoshop, illustrator, indesign, browser...I need rapid response and switching among programs. And better boot up speed.

For this purpose, will I feel the difference on performence between T5500 vs T7200? If not, I would rather save that $150 difference.

No matter what, I will order 2G Ram and 7200rpm harddrive for it. Please advice.

 

The t5500 should be good enough for those tasks.

 

Photoshop is CPU/RAM intensive application, so yes you will notice the difference between the T5500 and the T7200. That's if Photoshop is a priority for you.

 

If you multi task a lot espescially with Adobe products I would go with the 2GHZ T7200. If you are getting 2GB RAM and a 7200RPM drive, why skimp on the processor?

 

I agree that multi-tasking needs lots of RAM and a dual core CPU. However, I am not convinced that the performance difference between a T5500 and a T7200 will be noticeable unless the applications include processes which take several seconds to run.

John

 

Because alot people said, most users never fully use the CPU, but the RAM and HD are always the bottleneck.

 

You probably won't notice the difference except in areas where there are CPU intensive tasks being run that take several seconds or minutes to accomplish. 340MHz is a decent difference in speed for a Core 2 Duo processor because of the higher IPC and also don't forget the T7200 has an extra 2MB of L2 cache.

 

I will do some works on Adobe's often but not all the time. And the work is not too tough or huge itself, but I need open several Adobe's at same time, and shuffle between them. I hate that the screen freezes for a while when I do that on my Dell 700m.

 

You are right, and that is why I would not consider T5600.

 

I disagree. Go for the cheaper one. There is no way it is worth the price premium unless you cannot get enough performance and have money to burn.

My opinion is that you will find broken laptops on ebay for a song in less than 3 years that use faster socket Ms, and I would have no trouble swapping out the CPU. 150 dollars a lot for what the full processor costs at retail. If you are using it as a laptop, then its rarely going to be at full clock. The faster it goes the worse battery life you will get (1.6 gets better battery life than 2.0 W ~ f^2)

I do engineering work and photography on my computers. For photography a laptop just can't rival desktop because of the screen power requirements. Flexview (IPS) laptops are tempting but to costly.

My point is I guess you are better served by getting a few desktops if you are just going to use the laptop on an AC adapter and need speed. Or if you mostly need portability then most of the time you aren't really using it at 2.0 GHz anyway, so why pay the premium. The people who need the top of the line in power in a notebook are just rare, people I can think of are scientists using shared equipment or photojournalists who have to process the images themselves on the road. Or perhaps gamers which I don't really think of as a need, but rather a want. They just need something powerful they can carry and plug in.

The Z61t is a thin and light business notebook. In that role, I see almost no point to paying an extra 15% for 350 MHz, even if speed scaled linearly with clock, which is doesn't...

 

I'd say get the T7200, for the extra 2MB cache. IMHO, the jump from the T5500 to the T7200 is the biggest jump in the C2D Mobile product line (hence the T5xxx versus T7xxx).

 

I've always been more satisfied getting the faster processor up front. It means you'll be less inclined to replace the thing in the future. Sooner or later you'll ALWAYS need more cpu speed, more memory, and more hard drive space. Graphics chip only really matters if you're gaming or have some sort of specific requirement that needs one GPU or another. Since memory and hard drives are usually pretty easy to replace in the future but cpu upgrades are more difficult and sometimes not even possible, I'd say spend the money on the cpu NOW, because it's the most difficult to upgrade later.

$150 now is a whole lot cheaper than a new laptop and the longer you can delay the NEXT purchase, the better of an investment this one will be. In my opinion that is... But I've had great luck buying the fastest laptop I can afford and then keeping it for 4+ years. I just dropped a cpu upgrade into my 3-year old T41p and I think with that slight boost in speed, I'll keep this thing another 3 years at least unless the screen or motherboard fails.

 

I think the T5500 is good enough. Only benefit from the T7200 is more L2 and Virtualization which I don't know how helpful it is.

But, I also agree with flensr's comment above, the faster CPU is a better way to future proof your machine. RAM and other components will always get cheaper and are easier to upgrade than a CPU in a laptop.