Is buying a new laptop really worth it?

[willemvdm]

Hi everyone, I have a laptop that's 7 years old and was thinking maybe it is time to get me a new one. My current laptop is a Samsung RV510 and system info show that it has a Celeron Dual-Core T3500 CPU @ 2.10GHz. I started looking at a laptop similarly priced and spec'd to what I have now, specifically a celeron based laptop at game, expecting it to be better than what it was 7 years ago. I went to cpubenchmark.net to try and figure out how much better a new laptop would be compared to what I have now. To my surprise the celeron N3060 has a Mark of 984, compared to the celeron T3500 which is 1274. Can it be that my old celeron based laptop will outperform a new celeron. Is it then really worth buying a new laptop? Even if I look at the i5-7200U, its Mark is 4624, that is only 3.6 times better than what I have, is it really worth it forking out R8000 to go to that, weren't planning on spending that much anyway. Especially considering that I replaced my current laptops HDD with an SSD. Or am I missing something? My plan was to keep the old laptop and upgrade the new laptop to SSD at a later stage.

Just for some background. For normal web browsing I mostly use my phone. I use my laptop for the odd website development project and for that it is perfectly fine. Then occasionally I do some video editing. The editing itself is fine too, just saving/encoding when I'm done can be rather slow, but if a new celeron is going to be even slower and a new i5 will only mean waiting 10 minutes to process/encode a video compared to waiting 36 minutes, then I don't really think it is worth R8000. The only thing I can see that could be worth while in a new laptop is having faster USB3 ports available. Are my assumption correct that a 3.6 times higher mark wil result in encoding happening 3.6 times faster, i.e. what use to take 36 minutes will take 10 minutes on an i5 or is that mark perhaps logarithmic or as I said am I missing something else.

 

[Neoprod]

Sounds like you've decided already...that's cool

Personally, I wouldn't enjoy working on a machine that actively annoyed me (low res screen, not enough RAM to help task switching, SSD to help responsiveness). It would bug me. Guess I've been spoilt by work swapping out my lappie every 2 years.

 

[Exaelea]

You do get peace of mind that the 7 year old laptop wont die any second now. Your only saving grace on that old machine is that ssd, which makes it less frustrating to use. You didn't mention what OS its running and the ram-size.

Aside from that don't bother with the 30xx series Celerons, these are so horribly slow that an atom x5 feels faster.. Go for the 3350(dualcore)/3450(quadcore) or the 4000(dualcore)/4100(quadcore) series if you're sticking to Celerons.
And as you mentioned usb3, then theres also wireless AC on most them new budget laptops, support for higher display res outputs, less power consumption.

End of the day seems you don't mind waiting on encoding/recoding times, so maybe get a new Celeron laptop for daily use and plonk that Samsung down for the video editing stuff.

 

[willemvdm]

I'm Using Ubuntu 16.04. Before that I had Windows 7, upgraded to 10 and hated it. Moved to Ubuntu and never looked back. Win 10 speed was fine for my needs, it was 10's endless hunger for data that really put me off. I tried all the tricks, even tried various firewalls, but still ran out of data mid month, I only have access to mobile data, no ADSL or fibre in my area.

I'm not too worried about my current laptop going belly up, because I backup my documents once a week and every 3 months I do a full image backup, so if something do go wrong, I'll very quickly buy a new laptop and get things back to were it was within a day or 2.

Let me put it this way, I recall the time that I had a 386 PC, who remember those? At that point I were playing around with music editing and I remember every operation that involved major processing power (example noise reduction) would take several minutes to complete. Then I got a Pentium, can't remember what generation it was, think it was a Pentium 3 and the improvement was huge. It went from waiting minutes to waiting seconds to get something done. After that I got the laptop I have now, so from P3(?) to Celeron and I was rather disapointed, because both machines felt more or less the same, both were on the same windows version, not sure if it were win 7 or XP. I didn't mind too much that it were more or less the same, because I wanted the mobility. So my worry is that I might again be disappointed when I get a new laptop. I'm hoping for at least a 5+ times improvement from what I have now, like when I moved from the 386 to the Pentium.

My laptop has a 1366x768 display and seem most entry level laptops also still have that. Higher res would be nice, but I don't really care to much about that.

It seem like if I go for a price range of R3000 to R4000 it won't be much better than what I have now. I would need to go with R10000+ for a decent upgrade, but I didn't intend on spending that much on a laptop. <=== My question is, Is this statement correct, if so, I'll rather stay with my old laptop. I don't use it that much anymore anyway, do most of the things I do on my phone. There are some days that the whole day go by without me even turning on the laptop once.

 

[ponder]

It seem like if I go for a price range of R3000 to R4000 it won't be much better than what I have now. I would need to go with R10000+ for a decent upgrade, but I didn't intend on spending that much on a laptop. <=== My question is, Is this statement correct, if so, I'll rather stay with my old laptop. I don't use it that much anymore anyway, do most of the things I do on my phone. There are some days that the whole day go by without me even turning on the laptop once.

You can buy a decent i5, 8gb ram, 256gb ssd, 1080p ips laptop for under R10k if you know where to shop.

 

[newby_investor]

Raw CPU speeds have kind of plateaued of late, so the kind of improvement that you saw going from P1 to P3 back in the day won't really happen anymore.

Core count is going up though so if you manage to geta quad core CPU, multi-threaded applications are going to be better. But not all applications make use of this.

A newer laptop would benefit from (aside from the things already mentioned) the likely option to use an NVMe drive, though probably not in the budget section. Newer ones also tend to be lighter than similar machines of yesteryear, which may or may not be a factor for you.

I tend not to look at budget laptops since I refuse on principle to use anything with a 1366*768 screen, the ones with proper FHD screens tend to be a bit more expensive. So sorry can't be much help.

Though one I did look at was the Lenovo 320 I believe. It seemed decent and for a modest sum. Didn't end up buying one, eventually went with a desktop instead. But it's something you may consider.