AMD quad core cpu's

[leestudd30]

I'm hoping to get another laptop within the next few months and I would prefer to get one with an AMD quad core cpu. Googling them I've noticed 2 common ones that come up, the Phenom II P960 1.8 GHZ and the Phenom II N930 2GHZ. Aside from the speed can anyone tell me the main differences of them? I've also found an AMD A6-3400M which is only 1.4 GHZ but uses less power and has some kind of turbo boost feature like the Intel i5's.

[gumby6371]

Hi Lee,

When it comes to CPU's AMD will pretty much always give you more bang for your buck but Intel's will have the edge on performance but at a price.
It's horses for courses but you'll get a better overall system for your money going with AMD as you can spend more on the other bits and pieces which should limit bottlenecks in other areas.

As for laptops I'd go for CPU speed over number of cores as the majority of applications wont use all the cores anyway, a rule of thumb is a quicker clock speed on a dual core chip will out perform a lower clock speed on a quad core. Some games and video editing software now use multi core threading but you'd be better off with a pc for those applications anyway.
On the move running off battery power you're clock speeds are lowered to reduce power by default, this can be changed but obviously battery life will suffer.
Mobile CPU's are also shackled slightly due to limited cooling and other such things meaning a 2GHz quad pc cpu will be quicker than it's laptop equivalent.

To answer your question the 2 GHz quad core will give best performance from the ones you've listed but I'd still be looking for a 2.4GHz dual core (or higher) with 4GB of RAM (assuming it's a 64bit OS).
My 1.8 dual core lappy with 3GB of RAM is plenty quick enough for web, email and office type apps, anything needing real power gets done on my gaming pc.
The battery life is not just limited by the CPU but many other hardware factors not least the mAh rating on the battery itself, integrated graphics tend to be less of a power drain than dedicated graphics cards, usb devices obviously draw power, the bigger the screen the more power used to light it up, etc.....

Let me know what you actually want to do on your new laptop and I'll have a google at some good options.

Hope that helps

Gareth

[highlander]

On another note, do you actually need a portable computer? If your laptop spends pretty much 100% of its life sat on a desk, then the answer is "no" and you will be limiting yourself in terms of performance and upgrade potential as well as spending more money than you need to by buying a laptop.

Desktop PCs (typically meaning a small tower PC or a full-size desktop case, rather than one of these small-form-factor PCs some businesses buy) can cost a lot less to buy in the first place.

On a desktop, you could replace the processor with a faster model (i.e. if you buy one with an Intel Core i3, you may be able to replace it with a Core i5) - not so with most laptops, because the processor is surface-mounted to the system board. On a desktop, you can fit a more powerful graphics card. Again, not with laptops; their graphics card is integrated to the system board. You could fit a Blu-Ray disc drive to a desktop PC very cheaply, whereas with a laptop, you might find that you need a special drive specific to your laptop's manufacturer (and even to that model of laptop) and it'll cost you your remaining arm and leg to buy. Desktop hard drives (3.5in) are cheaper than laptop hard drives (2.5in), and you can get more hard drives in a desktop than you can in a laptop should you need more storage.

[leestudd30]

Thanks for the replies! To be brutally honest I don't really need a quad core one, I only use it for browsing, downloading and recoding mp3's, burning off dvd's etc, but for the £300 I should have I would prefer to have the extra power, I might have a go at pc gaming again if I can get a powerful enough one. I used to have a more powerful desktop pc but after moving out I don't have the space to keep it anymore, used to use it all the time to play downloaded games but not any more! I have been looking at the intel ones too but anything above an i3 seems to be very expensive, even though I probably won't need the extra power. I have seen an Acer Aspire 5553 on Ebay for around £300, think its this one:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Acer-Aspire-5 ... 3374843b28

[sirwiggum]

I got an AMD phenom 555 black a while back. Was supposed to be overclockable to unlock cores, but every time I did that it just caused the system to lock up, so I gave up and just run it as a 3 core.
Was reasonably priced (built a whole system for under £300 about 2 years ago) and runs fairly well on Windows 7 and Linux.

[gumby6371]

I noticed you mentioned gaming in which case you're probably going to need a dedicated graphics chip, a reasonable gaming laptop is going to set you back considerably more than £300 I'm afraid.
I bought a mid range graphics card for my gaming pc last year which came in at just under £200.
Gaming and video editing are the 2 main areas that will push computers to the limits.
Google the kind of games you fancy playing and check the recommended requirements before choosing a machine, then go for something quicker than required giving you a bit of future proofing.
FPS type games (CoD, Battlefield, Crysis) are the biggies as far as hardware requirements, lots of fast action, smoke, lighting effects etc
If you're looking at Warcraft type stuff they're much less demanding on hardware.

Another option is build yourself a media centre/gaming pc and slap it under the telly if space is a premium. Most graphics cards come with HDMI out nowadays, even some onboard graphics have it, so building the media centre is a doddle and all you need to do is slap a decent graphics card in and game on it through the tv. Fully upgradeable whenever your wallet can handle it. Even add a blu-ray drive if you want to go the whole hog.
The beauty of a pc is it can all be done as and when you can afford it once you've got the basic pc together. Windows 7 HP 64 bit is great for media centres and you can even get a remote for about £15 and an xbox style controller for the 'games for windows' series of titles.

I ripped all my daughters DVD's straight onto the media centre so no more sticky/scratched discs that wont play.

Building a pc is less complicated than assembling an Ikea wardrobe, but then again open heart surgery is less complicated than assembling an Ikea wardrobe

BTW a handy little tip is check the bay of E for a cheap second hand pc that comes with a Windows 7 HP license, buy it, rip the guts out if required and build to your own spec. If you call it an 'upgrade' it's perfectly legal.
A half decent case, PSU and Windows license is going to set you back about £150 so you can save quite a bit doing this. (Don't buy Dell tho, the sneaky buggers mount the boards arse about face so you can't fit anything else)

[Gary406]

i recently changed from amd to intel. and i wouldnt go back to amd now.
i have the i5 intel 2nd generation cpu guad core 3.3ghz. performs superb every day

[leestudd30]

Thank you for your answers but I need a laptop but not a desktop pc, I don't have the space for one in our flat anymore. The Acer 5553 from late 2010 has a separate Radeon 256MB graphics card and the AMD A6-3400M specced machines I've looked at have a 512MB one I think, there are some vids on youtube showing them running Crysis 2 so they can't be too bad.

[Gary406]

the ones on you tube could have ssd drives in them and not hard disc drive.
the ssd drive alone can make a notebook super super quick.

if you want a super quick then consider putting an ssd in it .

[gumby6371]

Gary is right when he says an ssd will boost performance, unfortunately they are ridiculously pricey for what i would class as minimal storage and with a lappy you can't fit a second slower drive for storage.

[leestudd30]

Fair point on SSD's, I will look into that. I've made a briefish spec of what I'm after:

Budget £300 (£350 at a push, looking at used and recon ones)
Separate graphics card (256MB or 512MB)
500GB hard drive (will accept a 320GB one and 7200RPM if possible)
4GB DDR3 memory (3GB will suffice)
15.6" screen (LED one would be nice) with at least 1366x768 resolution
Ultra Speed DVD/RW (blu ray if possible but I doubt it for the budget)
4 USB ports (3 will do, 1 usb 3.0 if possible), bluetooth if possible, HDMI output and card reader, webcam
2 hour minimum battery life (not gaming)

I've googled a lot of them, prices were a bit vague on google shopper but I looked at these ones:

HP Pavillion g7-1101sa
HP Compaq Pavillion G7-1204sa
Toshiba Satellite L755D
Acer Aspire As 5560G
Acer Aspire 5553
Dell Inspiron M501R
Samsung Series 3 NP300V5a-A04DX

The above are only quad core AMD (my preferred choice), for the budget the only alternatives I think are Intel i3 and the AMD E-450 dual core ones.

Lastly, can anyone tell me what an eSATA port is? Found one on my fiancee's laptop and wondered what it was for!

[sirwiggum]

eSata is for connecting external hard drives.

In the olden days you had to rely on either USB (bit slow) or FireWire (bit rare). As eSata mostly uses Sata the standard that hard drives use these days, it seems to be a bit quicker. (A lot of USB or Firewire external connectors were really convertors to IDE or Sata drives anyway).

[mjb]

As eSata mostly uses Sata the standard that hard drives use these days, it seems to be a bit quicker

esata *is* sata, just a smaller plug. as for it being a "bit quicker", there's roughly 20x speed difference when using a fast drive over esata on a 6Gbps controller than using the same drive over usb2

[highlander]

USB3.0 (released 2008) - 4.8 Gigabit (or 0.6 Gigabytes / 600 Megabytes) per second
USB2.0 (released 2000) - 480 Megabit (or 0.06 Gigabytes / 60 Megabytes) per second
USB1.1 (released 1998) - 12 Megabit (or 0.0015 Gigabytes / 1.5 Megabytes) per second

eSATA (released 2004) - 3.2 Gigabit (or 0.4 Gigabytes / 400 Megabytes) per second

The above speeds are INTERFACE ONLY and do not take into account the maximum transfer rate supported by the hard disk drive itself (typically no more than 150 Megabytes per second) - so in practical terms you will see no difference in transfer rates between USB3.0 drives connected to a USB3.0 port, and the same hard disk drive connected via eSATA.The same is NOT true for Solid State Disks (SSDs) which use Flash memory, which can read at up to 560 Megabytes per second; you'll find that USB3.0 will read from an SSD faster than eSATA can.

- USB can provide power to devices, eSATA cannot
- USB is more common than eSATA
- eSATA was by far the fastest when it was released, a full four years before the USB3.0 standard was ratified

PCI Express-based SSD drives are a whole different kettle of fish; you're talking read speeds of up to 6 Gigabytes per second (6000 Megabytes per second) but PCI Express is an internal-only solution.

[sirwiggum]

As eSata mostly uses Sata the standard that hard drives use these days, it seems to be a bit quicker

esata *is* sata, just a smaller plug. as for it being a "bit quicker", there's roughly 20x speed difference when using a fast drive over esata on a 6Gbps controller than using the same drive over usb2

Just a wee bit then?