Dell Inspiron 1501 vs Dell Inspiron 6400, or something completely different?

[subucni]

Hi there,


Accidentally got a friend of mine addicted to World of WarCrack (you know how it is the 1st 10 days trial is free and by the end of it you're hooked).

Anyway, he's starting to get a bit of stick for constantly being on the family pc, so he's decided to buy a wifi router and a pc for himself in his room. He has absolutely no space for a desktop, so a laptop it is going to have to be.


With that in mind his budget is As close to £500 as he can get, but is willing to go upto £550, maybe even £600 if it really is worth the extra money.

I've had a look around all the usual suspects like scan, ebuyer, aria, dabs etc... and the best bang for buck laptops i can seem to find are from dell.

Currently looking at the £549 Inspiron 1501 and the £539 Inspirion 6400, both have 15.4" screens, come with vista, have 120gb of hdd, 8x DVD+/-RW, come with wifi, and come with a dedicated graphics card (although not really essential for WoW as it'll run on a 64mb card but will leave a little head room for things like Age of Empires 3, CS:S, DoD:S etc..)

The problem comes with the CPU, i have no idea how the AMD Turion 64 X2 - TL52 (which comes with 2gb of ram) is compared to the Core 2 Duo - T5300 (with less ram at 1gb)

Personally if the Intel cpu turns out to be much of a marked improvement over the AMD i'd be tempted to go for the Intel as Ram can be cheaply upgraded if needed but as i say, i don't know how the 2 compare as was hoping someone could shed a little light on that for me.



Alternatively, if you know of any others that i may have missed that suit his budget and requirements of a standard pc that can run all his day to day programs, + a little bit of light gaming on top, nothing to excessive like oblivion etc.. i'd love to hear them.


Thanks for any and all responses in advance,


Bres

[staffsMike]

Both pretty much the same performance wise. The AMD's aren't bad at all. The intel is an older core duo rather than core 2 duo.

You don't get much in the way of performance with this kind of budget just find the one with the nicest screen..the right size and accessories that suit his needs.

I think you're best off sticking with dell but be aware that 1501 is not a dedicated graphics card it's intergrated.

The 6400 can be configured with a x1400 or some such card which is dedicated.

There's some cheap HP pavillions around which come with a half decent gfx card..not that I like HP lol

[subucni]

Cheers for the help,

Wasn't aware the T5300 wasn't full spec core 2 duo, is it like how the old Pentium D Dual core processors compared to the proper core 2 duos?

That said, if that's the case, how about the Inspirion 6400 with a T5500 cpu at £562, the Intel website does show it in amongst all the full core 2 duos.

Any idea how the T5500 compares to the TL52, as I can easily find plenty of benchmarks on desktop cpus but can't seem to find any for mobile cpus.


Bres

[staffsMike]

Yeah the T5500 is core 2 duo. The difference between core duo and 2 duo is pretty much just that the core duo ran 533mhz where the 2 duo runs 667mhz.

I don't have any benchmarks but i have setup laptops with the T5500 and the TL52.. There isn't much difference to be perfectly honest. The laptops had the same amount of ram etc and same hard drive speed and felt very similar.

Either of these chips running along side 2gb of ram will give you good day to day performance so go with the one thats the best deal.