Portege R835 -- 50X vs. 56X??

This looks like a great new laptop for business travel. My question is whether to get the 50X from Bestbuy for $749 or the 56X from an internet store for around $900? The 56x has greater performance, but do you really need that if you are just doing routine business apps plus web surfing?

 

I've just been testing a refurbished R700 that I bought recently and noticed that more than about 10 seconds sustained full (wPrime benchmark running 4 threads) CPU load resulted in the CPU speed getting throttled, presumably to keep the temperature within acceptable limits.

It's my guess that the R835 will show similar behavior in which case the potential benefit of a faster CPU is largely lost. The slower CPU option still has two cores running four threads and will give you more than acceptable performance for your likely usage. A 25% difference in CPU performance isn't noticeable for tasks which may take only a few seconds. It's the 2 cores running 4 threads that provide responsiveness - a bit like having sufficient checkouts at the supermarket that there is rarely a queue.

John

 

Thanks John for a quick and useful response.