Which Laptop

M

murray654

Senior Member
Joined
Aug 15, 2005
Messages
560
Reaction score
55
Location
Northern Drakensberg
Hi,

A friend wants a laptop/notebook.

Which one should I recommend?

Both come with 80GB HDD, 512mb RAM, 802.11g wlan etc

AMD Sempron 3500+ (1.6Ghz), 14.1" WXGA, Vista home basic - R4999

or

Intel M520, 1.6Ghz, 15.4" WXGA, XP Pro - R6200

Its a toss up between XP Pro with larger screen and Vista home basic, smaller screen.

Which one do I recommend?

Best regards,

Murray
 
I would go with the AMD. The sempron seem to perform better than the celeron plus you'll be getting vista. The smaller screen may also make the laptop smaller. So IMO I would go for the AMD. The 1.3" doesn't justify the higher price R1200
 
Yeah, but Vista with 512mb?

I agree that the Sempron, at that price, is a nicer computer but Vista will struggle with that much RAM. Is replacing Vista with a working OS an option?
 
The XP machine would work from the word go on any peripheral, but Vista has come a long way even without a service pack, so it is not half as unusable as when it came out. :)

Vista is the future, like it or not. Performance wise, I think the specs are pretty level. So che cheaper machine would win.
 
I must say that the m520 celeron is pretty quick with 1mb cache. Double the cache makes a huge difference. It beats my socket 939 3200+ with 512k cache in superpi 1m. So Don't write off the celerons quite yet. Intel is quite far ahead at the moment.
 
Its home basic edition - without all the "glass" and other nonsense - Is 512mb still not enough? I told the friend to find out what it costs to upgrade to 1GB ram.

Will he be able to get drivers for say a cell phone, to use as a modem? I know this works with XP.

Thanks for the advice.

Best regards,

Murray
 
the AMD has speedstep type technology for better battery life.
 
hes getting the intel M520 with xp machine - he found it for R5700 - it pays to shop around.

Thanks for the tips
 
Last edited:
pblaauw said:
So for those who enjoy their pc hardware, explain this to me:

I run 2 x Nvidia GTX 460's (slightly OC'd via MSI Afterburner) in SLI on a 24" Dell LED, with a 3rd 220 for driving the other monitors. BF3, near max settings had the cards running at 86'C & 82'C respectively. Any higher settings and the framerate would suffer, but not affect the temperatures..

Started playing Crysis 2 in the week. Now remember this is a console optimized game that's a year old, so I just set everything to 'Extreme', and didn't bother downloading the DX11 texture pack. Last night, the two cards are running at 98'C and 92'C respectively.. Thats 10 degrees hotter on a year old game! Framerate doesn't suffer at all though and the cards seem to cope ???
Click to expand...

It doesn't address your question about the change in temp in a short time but the first thing I do if I get temps rising is to clean out the heat sinks on the cards, with all the cooling fans needed to keep them cool I find that they get dirty quickly affecting the temps as the cooling is no longer as effective, especially if they have been OC'd
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X