vaio VPC Z 116GG/B

I am planning to buy a new laptop and hoping to get some advise on the device im choosing, is the vpc z i5 116GG worth it?? or should i wait for the i7 117, cause they only sell the 116 here in my country.. tnx

 

There are two actual differences between the two chips: 1) Clock speed and 2) cache: 2.53GHz vs. 2.66 and 3MB cache vs 4

Based on those differences, also based on benchmarks, you can expect and overall 8-10% speed increase with the i7. Now 5% of that is clearly the cpu clock speed difference. The difference of having a larger cache is a little harder to quantify, it depends on what you're running. but an overall 8-10% is what folks report seeing.

You won't notice that in any normal usage scenarios, but you will see it on benchmarks and in areas where an 10% cpu speed difference would be important (I can't personally think of any examples but I'm positive that they do exist )

There is also a corresponding approx. 10-15% hit on battery life and heat generation.

Last but not least, there is the 'Bragging rights' benefit of having an i7.

Ultimately, it's your choice. Both are good options.

 

I would go ahead and get the 116. Very little real life benefit to the 117 if any. It'll be mostly in your head.

 

I have considered both the 117 and 116 models too and eventually decided to go for the 116 for its slightly longer battery life (rated 5.5hr vs 5hr) and the lighter weight (yes just 30g lighter but that means the 117 is not having an edge at this front), and obviously the lower price. I wanted a notebook that could serve as a portable environment for GPU-based parallel software development. The i5 + GT 300m configuration should fit the bill. Unfortunately, the graphics driver that comes with it is a rather old version which could not use the CUDA 3.0 toolkit and NVidia's latest driver does not support vaio notebooks at this moment... Well going back to the original question: Unless you need to do a lot of video/graphics rendering without GPU acceleration then the i7 might give you the optimistic 10% increase in speed. The security of owning the top of the line model would also wear off pretty quickly, with newer and faster models coming out every couple of months.

 

Keep in mind that the 117GG has 1920x1080 screen. The 116 has 1600x900 one.

 

The ssd on the Z117 is twice the size of the ssd in the Z116

 

Well I am not drooling over the HD display but the bigger (and faster) SSD alone probably worth the extra dollars. Think about it more, I am no longer sure why I did not go for the Z117.