Processor Advice

[Phil.]

Hi

Have been pricing up new laptops this weekend at around the £400 mark so been looking at dells, asus, lenovo, acer and commonly there seems to be a trade off for processor model with the quality of other components.

Comparing a few similarly priced laptops at the moment with processors that all look very similar from their summaries (2 cores, around 2ghz) but quite different on the intel page;

T5750
T5550
T2390

So my question is, how important to the general speed of the processor is the size of the L2 cache, this bus/core ratio & bus speed. Would paying the extra to have the better processor only be noticeable if using dual core intensive programs?

Also tips on good places to buy would be helpful.

Thanks

[JonB]

You will want the T5750. Faster Bus speed and a faster L2 cache.

There isn't much distance between the three, all have a TDP of 35W, all 65nm based and all run on M0 stepping.
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Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it?s worth.

[Hetzer]

Just make sure you don't get a Celeron CPU. POS.
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[Seb]

For day to day use, you'll be fine with a Core 2 Duo (thats the T5x50s in your example), you'll likely find that with Vista, your being bottlenecked by the HD rather than the cpu itself.
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