Wondering if anyone with more knowledge on processors could help me out here.
Looking at buying a new laptop, found 2 which are pretty decent for the jobs that I need it for, both of which are the same price. There was some slight differences with hard drives etc but one of the main differences was that one has an AMD and one has an Intel processor.
My question is... what is best!!! the 2 processors are:
AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual Core TL58
Intel Core2Duo Mobile T7300
Any help would be appreciated, quite tempted to go AMD
Full Version: Laptop Advice Re: Processors
The graphics cards that are compaible with the AMD seem to be of poorer quality than those that are compatible with Intel chip. I am meant to have a 256mb card however it doesn't even render graphics properly for a game two years old and needs 128mb.
QUOTE (Carlos @ Jan 9 2008, 19:32) 
The graphics cards that are compaible with the AMD seem to be of poorer quality than those that are compatible with Intel chip. I am meant to have a 256mb card however it doesn't even render graphics properly for a game two years old and needs 128mb.
Thats odd...last time I followed the pc market, the processor had nothing to do with graphics card compatibility. Are you sure?
QUOTE (xbl @ Jan 9 2008, 21:38)
Thats odd...last time I followed the pc market, the processor had nothing to do with graphics card compatibility. Are you sure?
Yes, Carlos is clearly mental, but we all knew that already
Go for the intel, its faster.
The AMD processors are better for running graphics, their internal multimedia extensions are more comprehensive and the instruction set is better tailored for multimedia operations.
However, you'd be better examining the package as a whole. The mother board's front side bus and cache size makes a hell of a difference, much more than the overall speed of the processor. Typically Intel boards FSB runs between 533MHz and 800MHz, this essentially determines how quickly data can be sent to the processor and as such represents the bottle neck.
To overcome this the processors on board memory, the cache memory becomes important, you can get some fairly big caches these days and Intel tend to go for standard FSBs and big caches. Some AMD machines have a technique called hyperthreading where the FSB is made physically small enough to run at the processors own speed while avoiding clock skew and system lock up, it's an elegant solution.
Of course, how quickly you can read data depends on the R/W head on the hard disk and the RAM size dictates how much you can run at once without degrading performance. Overall, these days, processor speed is the least important attribute on the machine, aftere they broke the 1 GHz barrier would you, the user really notice the difference? Early Pentium 4 machines ran at 2.45GHz, the standard these days is more or less 1.83GHz with not an iota of difference in performance (that was before dual cores by the way which don't really speed your machine up at all)
One last thing, if your getting a lap top don't expect a great graphics card. Big graphics cards, the standard of which is rapidly becoming 512Mb tend to emit a lot of heat while they run (remember a graphics card is nothing more than a seperate custom micro processor) and the cooling technology required for a compact design like a laptop would make the price prohibitive (in desktops they just stick in a bloody great bg fan)
However, you'd be better examining the package as a whole. The mother board's front side bus and cache size makes a hell of a difference, much more than the overall speed of the processor. Typically Intel boards FSB runs between 533MHz and 800MHz, this essentially determines how quickly data can be sent to the processor and as such represents the bottle neck.
To overcome this the processors on board memory, the cache memory becomes important, you can get some fairly big caches these days and Intel tend to go for standard FSBs and big caches. Some AMD machines have a technique called hyperthreading where the FSB is made physically small enough to run at the processors own speed while avoiding clock skew and system lock up, it's an elegant solution.
Of course, how quickly you can read data depends on the R/W head on the hard disk and the RAM size dictates how much you can run at once without degrading performance. Overall, these days, processor speed is the least important attribute on the machine, aftere they broke the 1 GHz barrier would you, the user really notice the difference? Early Pentium 4 machines ran at 2.45GHz, the standard these days is more or less 1.83GHz with not an iota of difference in performance (that was before dual cores by the way which don't really speed your machine up at all)
One last thing, if your getting a lap top don't expect a great graphics card. Big graphics cards, the standard of which is rapidly becoming 512Mb tend to emit a lot of heat while they run (remember a graphics card is nothing more than a seperate custom micro processor) and the cooling technology required for a compact design like a laptop would make the price prohibitive (in desktops they just stick in a bloody great bg fan)
I'm with Marrez on this one, of the two, the Core2Duo 7300 is the better option. Depends what your wanting to do with it in the end. If you intend at some point in the future to upgrade it to a 64-bit operating system, go for the AMD as that particular Intel processor doesn't have a 64-bit architecture. I assume it comes with an O/S?
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