New Laptop Time - Q310 or Q320? Opinions please!

Hi guys,

My degre has led me to have £700 of funding made available for "learning resources", which of course means, brand-spanking new mid-range laptop.

Currently I have a 2 year old Dell Inspiron, but want something more compact and powerful.

I spend a lot of time using Dreamweaver and Photoshop, so looking for a machine that is capable of running both of those, current machine has a headache when trying to do the more advanced photoshop bits.

So I've been looking at reviews and came across the Q310, looks a lovely machine and being a Manchester United fan (for my sins!!) I thought the red gradient looked great. The 2.4 Ghz processor was also a big plus side. Then reading the review on here I noticed it was being replaced by the Q320, cheaper, smaller processor but an independant graphics card.

Cost isnt a factor in this really, will pay £800 max for a notebook. But what I want to know is.

1. I notice the speakers on the Q320 are located on the underside, does this mean that if you have it on your lap the sound is muffled? Are the Q310 better?

2. Which of the Q320 and Q310 will run Photoshop more effectively? The Q310 with the bigger processor or the Q320 with the independant graphics card?

3. Which, in your opinion is the better machine?

Thanks in advance for your help,

George

 

Welcome to the forums. Samsung has several configurations of both Q310 and Q320. Please mention the specs (CPU, GPU, memory) of the configuration you're looking at.

If you haven't already done so, you may want to read this: http://www.trustedreviews.com/laptops/review/2009/05/19/Samsung-Q320---13-4in-Laptop/p1

 

Below is a review of the Q320 and it is compared to the Q310

http://www.trustedreviews.com/laptops/review/2009/05/19/Samsung-Q320---13-4in-Laptop/p1

 

1. In my experience the bottom mounted speakers on some of the other Samsung notebooks give above average audio quality. However, I don't normally try to listen to audio with the computer on my knees.

2. At the moment the faster CPU would be the safer option. Adobe is claiming there will be a version of Photoshop which will offload processing to the GPU, but I don't know if that has arrived.

I would prefer the Q310 because of more vertical pixels so there's less vertical scrolling to do. I would also prefer the Intel graphics since there's no certainty that the nVidia GPU won't die just after the warranty expires.

John

 

Photoshop CS4 is GPU accelerated.

I don't know if X4500 will be good enough or that a more powerful GPU is beneficial.

I'd pick the Q320. It's looks a lot better and the powerful GPU will come in handy in the future. The lower T6400 CPU is already powerful enough.

Sofar I haven't heard of any problems with Nvidia 9xxx series, I personally would not worry about that.

 

Thanks for the advice guys, funding lady came and ended up opting for the Q320 machine, purely because the nice lady wouldnt go over £700

 

Great choice, in my opinion. Don't know if you read my post above because we posted at the same moment.

 

Nope just read it, thanks for your reply though