My desktop v. a laptop I might buy soon

[Craig321]

Hi,

I've been looking at getting a laptop in about 3 months. Prices and specs may well change in 3 months, but oh well

Anyway, here's the laptop I put together on Dell:

Intel® CoreTM 2 Duo Processor T5200 (1.60 GHz, 2 MB L2 cache, 533 MHz FSB)
1024MB 533MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM (2x512)
80GB (7200rpm) SATA Hard Drive
256MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ Go 7300 TurboCache™
Vista Premium
15.4" Wide Screen WXGA (1280 x 800) Display

and here's my current desktop PC:

3.0GHZ 1MB L2 (note: it isn't C2D )
200GB SATA HDD
256MB NVIDIA 7600GT
Asus P5P800-SE
1GB Dual Channel DDR Corsair XMS3200 Pro (2x512)

I'm not expecting the laptop to beat my desktop on gaming but I'm just wondering how the laptop will be compared to my desktop in applications?

Thanks,
Craig.

[dave87]

It should be quicker in everything but gaming.

I went from an Athlon 3200 with 1.5gb RAM, to a CoreDuo (laptop) 2x2ghz, with 2gb RAM, and the difference was noticeable

[Craig321]

It should be quicker in everything but gaming.

I went from an Athlon 3200 with 1.5gb RAM, to a CoreDuo (laptop) 2x2ghz, with 2gb RAM, and the difference was noticeable

Hopefully it'll be quicker in everything but gaming.

You went from a Athlon 3200 -> a C2D 2GHZ thats rather a larger jump than from 3GHZ P4 -> C2D 1.6GHZ isn't it?

Thanks,
Craig.

[Craig321]

Bump

Anyone got any idea how fast a laptop of that spec can do PI to 1mb in please?

[MSIC]

My observation of moving (on my desktop) from 1 Gig to 2, and then single core to dual, is that although plenty of things become snappier and processing-specific stuff is of course quicker, much of the feel of speed of computers arises from the rate that these can be fed data ie the hard drive.
I note that you mention a 7200 speed laptop hard drive, so as long as it's modern, with a good cache size and good seek speed etc, you'll be good. I can promise you that if you put in a 5400 speed (or heaven forbid a 4200) you will notice that far more than a reduced processor or RAM.