Core2 Duo T7500 (2.2ghz) -> Core 2 Duo T7700(2.40 GHz) Worth the extra $350 dollars?

I am considering purchasing a new Santa Rosa SZ and was woundering if the price tag of upgrading from Core2 Duo T7500 (2.2ghz) -> Core 2 Duo T7700(2.40 GHz) is worth the extra $350 dollars. It a fairly big price jump fom the T7300->T7700 and i woundering if maybe the cost would be better of going to RAM/HDD upgrade. I read somewhere that it should be the same power consumption as the lower models.

I mainly do a lot of photoshop, video editing and encoding and some gaming. Anyone with a T7700 have experience with performance increases?

Also what do people thinking of the new hybrid hard drives in the Sony SZ. Does it give that much a performance increase and power decrease?

 

You will get, at best, a 9% improvement in CPU speed for those tasks for which the CPU processing speed is the bottleneck. Personally, I wouldn't pay that extra money.

More RAM, particularly with Vista, is much more like to give value for money on the overall improvement of performance.

John

 

I personally don't think it is worth it, I had the choice of the 680 or the 650, and performance verus price went for the 650. The difference on performance would have been marginal.

 

Allright. I guess the price increase for the marginal performance gain is a bit excessive. Changing the CPU from the SZ diagrams i have seen doesn`t seem to be too much a hassle for future upgrades. Cheers for the feedback.

 

They are average performing Samsung drives. There is no performance gain nor power decrease.

A Samsung Spinpoint M5 250GB outperforms them by quite a large margin.

If you want ultimate performance go for a Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 200GB 7200RPM. You can read on storagereview.com why.