2.4 or 2.53 on a Z

Anyone have an opinion on the difference between the two chips? Is the faster chip worth 300 bucks more(CTO)? What about battery life loss with the faster chip? What about game playing... Seems that there wouldnt be that much of a performance difference...What do you guys think?

 

Definitely not worth $300 more. Stick with the 2.4GHz chip. Quite minimal performance increase really. Maybe about 5% or so.

 

Thats what I thought... Any disagreements? What about gaming? I figured I would get 3gigs of ram for gaming...

 

The 2.4 chip and 3gigs would be excellent for gaming. Don't go over this though. No need.

 

Thanks guys

 

2.53 over 2.4 has zero effect on gaming.

Some CPU dependent applications can benefit upto 10% from the extra cache and increase in speed.

 

P9500:
frequency - 2.53GHz
L2 Cache - 6 MiB
Max Voltage - 1.162V

P8600:
frequency - 2.4 GHz
L2 Cache - 3 MiB
Max Voltage - 1.25V


The doubling of the cache size on P9500 effectively increases the overall performance of the 2.53 MHz CPU. In playing games, this will be in terms of increased FPS. Because the max voltage is lowered on P9500, the losses are kept roughly the same as the P8600, even with speed increase.

However, more than anything else, I'd pay for the 2x the cache. Here's a link that benchmark's performance difference between CPU's of different L2-cache size.

Granted that P9600 and P8600 are a different generation of core 2 duo based on 45 nm manufacturing process from the one that they're testing (65 nm), I think the conclusion is equally valid for Pxx00's as well.

So do I think P9600 is worth the $100 more over P8600? If just for speed increase from 2.4 to 2.53, perhaps not. But with the cache as part of it as well, and without increase in losses (always nice on a laptop), then definitely yes.


However, if Sony is charging $300 for for the processor (total rip off), then maybe not worth it . If you look at newegg.com or other online websites, the price difference between the two is around $100 or so.

 

There will be no performance difference in games, maybe a little* in RTS' like supreme commander. Definatly not worth it!

 

For most 3D games, the GPU is going to be the bottleneck on the Vaio Z. The 9300M GS is, quite frankly, a mediocre card at best. (See some 3DMark scores for resolutions closest to the native Z resolutions if you don't believe me.)

However, if not doing 3D heavy stuff, it will make a quite nice difference. Especially if multitasking and actually running multiple programs simultaneously, the double cache size means far fewer RAM fetches.
If you tend to do things in a single app at a time, and only play 3D games, I'd say don't bother. If you tend to do lots of things concurrently, like browsing the web while you zip a directory, download several files and listen to music, all at the same time, then the difference will be more noticeable.
Most benchmarks run inside both a 3 and 6 MB cache, so there will be little difference. But in real world apps, with multiple concurrent apps, the difference is there.
Is it worth it, with the price difference? If you shell out $2500-3000 on a machine, the price difference is small relative to the total costs, but it's still not a lot of bang for the buck, and probably a waste if all you do is use apps one at a time and play 3D games.