Need advice please....

[The Lensman]

I'm looking at buying a laptop, and I've got it down to these two sets of specs....any opinions would be welcome.

Option 1

Processor: IntelCore 2 Duo T9600, 2.8 1066mhz 6m L2 Cache
Ram: 6GB, DDR2, 800 Mhz 2 Dimm
Vid Card: 512Mb ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650
Hard Drv: 640 G (2x 320) 5400 RPM Sata Hard Drive
Screen: Hi Resolution glossy widescreen (1400x900)
3 Year Warranty

Cost: 1,269 (subtotal)

Option 2

Processor: IntelCore i7-720QM Quad Core Processor @ 1.6Ghz (2.8 Ghz Turbo Mode 6Mb Cache)
Ram: 6GB Shared Dual Channel DDR3 1066 Mhz
Vid Card: 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650
Hard Drv: 250 Gb 7200 RPM Sata Hard Drive
Screen: HD+ (900p) Bright LED Display
1 Year Warranty

Cost: 1,264 (subtotal)

My primary uses will be 3d Modeling Apps such as Vue D' Spirit, Truspace and Poser, Video Editing, Gaming, Photoshop, Itunes, Watching Movies.

In the last decade, I've only upgraded twice, and didn't really need to know much about the machines as anything was an improvement over what I had before. Things have gotten much more complicated in terms of knowing which processors are better, etc.

It used to be simple...386 was better than 286, 486 was better than 386, etc. Ditto for RAM....

I'm leaning towards option two because the ram and vid card is better. But how does a 1.6 Ghz Quad Core with a turbo boost to 2.8 Ghz stand up against a 2.8 Duo Core?

The Duo Core price was with a 650 dollar discount....the Quad Core had no discount....it seems a little wierd to be getting a better machine for a few bucks cheaper. There's got to be a trade off in there...so where is it? Aside from the size of the hard drive, the processor is all I can see, but I just don't know enough about Duo Core\Quad Core. I've watched a couple of videos that explain the concept, but don't really tell me what I need to know in terms of how these particular two stand up against each other.

On option 2, I dropped the hard drive storage capacity in order to get the price down to my spending window. I prolly could drop it down a bit on option 1 and save myself some money, what with external drives being so much cheaper.

Again, any help or insight would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Marc]

I'd go for the Quad Core.

I'd wander over to a reputable hardware site and look at the benchmarks for the two processors - they often have a faciliy to compare processor performance and let you choose the ones you want to compare on so you could see how it goes for a 3D render for example.

In recent years clock speed has in a way become very meaningless. A processor can have a slower clock speed than it's predecessor yet through design evolution, larger on-die caches etc blow them out the water.

Do you have brands/models for the two?

When laptops are advertised with say 640GB drive space using 2 x 320GB drives, they are setup in the RAID-0 configuration where the data is striped across both drives which means if a drive fails you lose the lot (Toshiba drives are very common on laptops and they are very unreliable). Yes you can repartition but you'd have to make sure you've generated the recovery disks etc before hand.

 

[The Lensman]

Do you have brands/models for the two?

Dell Studio 17. My last machine was an Inspiron and was really happy with it, so I figured I go Dell again. My family has had a great track record with them as well.

 

[LaxScrutiny]

The i7 is better than the Core2, first of all think of a 486 compared to a first generation Pentium, they were both running about 90 mhz at the time, the Pentium was faster. Those were my first two computers. It's never been just about clock speed.

Secondly you are getting that speed from each core, and you are getting 4 cores with i7. Third, you are getting the same peak speed with Turbo, but it is throttling down when idle to save power and less heat.

A factor in the different cost is the hard drive, you are getting two larger (but slower) drives in the Core2, so that is part of the cost. Put 2 drives in RAID in the i7 and Dell will up the price quite a bit.

For 3d render and video editing, the quad will be much better. For gaming it will be more about the video card and the RAM, and neither machine is a gaming powerhouse but they will work OK at lower res.