Last laptop question, maybe..

F

FiremanThul

New Member
While the lenovo was good, many reports of heat issues have turned me off of it. I'm leaning towards the acer 4820tg.. Not overly thrilled with my past evaluations of acer, but I've been told they've improved things a bit.

Anyhow. I plan on playing starcraft 2 and WoW, maybe occasionally TF2. Is it worth $100 to go from the i3-350 to the i5-450 for my application? There are 2 models of this particular acer, both have exact same specs other than processor, but the i3 is 700 and the i5 is 800. I can afford either..
 
They are very similar dual-core CPUs. Although one's labeled an i3 and one's an i5, they're both using the same 32nm Arrandale architecture. The i3 doesn't have turbo mode enabled. The i5 does. The i3 runs at 2.267 GHz, the i5 runs at 2.4 Ghz with turbo up to 2.667. However, there's a fair amount of literature saying that WoW has mixed result with turbo mode, so you may only be talking a 133 Mhz difference in the two CPUs, not worth $100. The i5-540 is a newer chip (June '10 vs. Jan '10 for the other one). The i5's integrated GPU is marginally faster and has a wee bit higher multiplier. But these are very close CPUs.

If you look at Passmark scores (on CPUbenchmark.net):
the i3-350M gets a 2089 (ranked #201), the i5-450M gets a 2460 (ranked #166). The rankings include desktop CPUs, thus the relatively low ranks on very new CPUs.

Anyhow, for the purposes of Blizzard products, I doubt you'd see any perceptiible difference.

But for generally future-proofing, if the gap were $50 I'd say go for the i5. But a $100 adds 15% to the cost of your system. The passmark says you get an 18% improvement with the i5 ... but you certainly wouldn't get a a 15% performance boost in WoW and SC2 I don't think. I think you'd get better bang for your buck dropping in small-capacity SSD (a $100-200 upgrade) if this is going to be a dedicated gaming machine that doesn't require storage for other stuff ... everything I see indicates that that would be the biggest performance helper for WoW.
 
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