HEL80 with t7200?

are any stores shipping this right now? most i've seen offer the t5xxx c2d right now but the t7xxx are eta october or later. velocity micro has a rebranded version with the t7200 but i don't have that kind of money. if someone could give me a site, that would be great.

 

We will receive the T7200 and T7600 later this week, so allowing for build and burn in time we will begin shipping them next week.

The T7400 will not be in for another two weeks, and we will begin shipping them the following week.

 

thanks, ill probably put in an order. i'm thinking about getting the cheapest ram and hdd options possible and upgrading myself. is there any way i can special order and have those omitted to save some money? also, how would this affect the warranty?

 

We cannot warranty an incomplete laptop, so at least get the minimum memory (either a 512MB piece or a 1,024MB piece depending on how much you want in total). Getting the smallest hard drive doesn't really make sense because I doubt if you can find larger ones that will cost less than the upgrade cost on our website.

 

Powernotebooks' upgrades are reasonably priced. It may be worth a few extra dollars to retain the comprehensive warranty on the entire system and its components.

 

puts it out of my price range. why can't you guys offer 256mb sticks

 

lol, what is your price range?

 

$1500 max, and there are some things i just wont give up in a laptop. i get what i NEED, and try to leave out hdd and ram for later upgrades when i can afford it.

 

I would go for the Core 2 Duo T5600 1.83GHz processor if you are on a budget. It is still very fast and I doubt you are going to notice a difference between it and the T7200. I hardly notice a difference doing general tasks between a Core 2 Duo T7600 and my regular Pentium M 750, if that says anything. Today's processors are more than fast enough. Overkill even. Concentrate on the RAM (1GB+) and hard drive if you want the best performance you can feel. The faster CPU is just going to produce higher numbers in synthetic benchmarks which mean . . basically nothing.

 

now i've heard that this would be a smart thing going from a t2500 to a t2400, but the t7200 to t5600 has the cache difference as well, and i've heard that does make a difference for gaming and other certain apps.

 

Not really. There was an article that compared the 2MB and 4MB cache Core 2 Duos (don't remember the link), and it showed a nominal 3.5% performance difference between them or something. Not noticable.

Like I said if you want to upgrade worthwhile parts . . make it the hard drive and RAM. I sure notice the difference between a 5400 and 7200RPM hard drive, and also the difference between 1GB and 2GB is significant if you are a gamer. There is nothing the T7200 can do that the T5600 can't.

 

thanks chaz

ill start messing around with configurations with that in mind

 

I agree that you could make a lot of upgrades with the money saved by going with the T5500. As Chaz says, most users will never fully max out their processor's potential. You could probably afford the extra RAM and faster HD with the savings.

 

Sorry to thread jack, but I was wondering, does powernotebooks use perpendicular 5400 or 7200 HDD drives? I know they use either seagate or hitachi. If they used perpendicular 5400 and a regular 7200 drive, by opting for the 5400 one can save quite a bit of cash aswell. A perpendicular 5400 is almost as fast as a regular 7200.

 

We do not have any models that use the perpendicular drives...at least not yet.

 

Yeah I would have ordered a 160g if you had one.

 

What I'm figuring on doing is when some larger notebook drives come out (200GB or whatnot), I'll just get one of those, and an external case, then swap the drive in my notebook into the external case and put a bigger one in. No waste, everyone wins Might even just do it with a 160GB drive if I get antsy.

 

IM going to be doing viedo editing w/ my Compal (hgl or hel im not sure yet).

I heard that this is a CPU intensive task. Will I notice a difference if I upgrade to the 2.33mhz C2D?

Thanks

 

I think you'll be fine even if you went with the T5500. Buying the T7600 would be a very expensive upgrade that is not necessary. I personally wouldn't buy anything above the T7200.

Most people overestimate how much processing power they need and almost never fully utilize the processing ability of their CPUs.

 

Video editing is HUGELY processor intensive though, chrisyano. I have a dual-CPU Xeon system at home here that still takes a fairly long time to render a video. Muska692: If you plan on doing a lot of video editing, then yes, a faster processor will help. The extra cache of going up to a T7200 at least will help. I don't think that the T7600 will give you enough bang for your buck to make it worthwhile unless you have money to throw around, but I'd highly recommend at least getting a T7200, if not a T7400 for video editing.

Assuming you're seriously going to be using it for that. If that's not going to be a major part of what you do with the laptop and can handle waiting longer for a video to render, then the T5500 is probably adequate.

 

I just ordered a HEL80 from Powernotebooks yesterday. I plan to use it to do some basic video editing. I'll try and put together a review and my experience with video editing on it when I get it setup. Supposed to get it next Friday. This is going to be the longest week.