Computers & Electronics

Lack of affordable FAST laptops

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  • Aug 17th, 2014 1:02 pm
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Deal Addict
Feb 11, 2007
1124 posts
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Whitby

Lack of affordable FAST laptops

So what's with laptops lately? Either you pay body parts for a bottom tier i5 or i7, pay even more for a custom model with a high end quad core i7, or suffer with underperforming trash that gets smoked by an 8 year old core 2 duo.... what gives? WHY are these garbage cpus being produced when intel could easily release a basic i3 or "Pentium" model which would destroy them all? I can't justify upgrading my 8 year old Thinkpad R61 because its Core 2 Duo T9300 beats or comes within spitting distance of almost every laptop priced under $500. Don't get me started on all the soldered processors and ram blocking upgrade paths... I'd happily accept another 1/8th inch thickness and another $5 cost for sockets.
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Deal Expert
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Feb 26, 2004
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You can thank the Macbook Air for starting the ultrabook craze where you can't upgrade anything. Can't change batteries either.
Sr. Member
Jun 22, 2014
559 posts
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Markham, ON
What do you mean by paying body parts? and what do you mean by trash CPUs? any examples?
Deal Guru
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Oct 14, 2003
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When you are looking at laptops under $500 you are looking at the low end. You get what you pay for.
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Newbie
Jul 16, 2014
95 posts
3 upvotes
, ON
The Core2 Duo T9300 mentioned by the OP gets a Passmark score of 1709. Looking at some laptops online there are some current sub-$500 offerings with CPUs that get worse scores (albeit with much lower TDP ratings) but it's not too hard to find a laptop for around $500 with a CPU that gets almost double that score. I have to wonder if the CPU is even that much of a bottleneck for whatever the OP is doing with his computer though. If he's not happy with current offerings in his price range then there's always upgrading the boot drive to SSD in the meantime. It seems like for most users that makes more of a difference to perceived speed of the computer than a faster CPU would.
Deal Fanatic
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Dec 23, 2008
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Milton
Beggars can't be choosers with a budget under $500.

There are decent ones out there with i5 cpus for $549 before tax, just add an ssd and you are golden.
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Jul 27, 2003
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Edmonton
pessimism wrote: I can't justify upgrading my 8 year old Thinkpad R61 because its Core 2 Duo T9300 beats or comes within spitting distance of almost every laptop priced under $500. Don't get me started on all the soldered processors and ram blocking upgrade paths... I'd happily accept another 1/8th inch thickness and another $5 cost for sockets.
Your R61 cost more than $1000 back then. You can easily find a new laptop today that will crush your old laptop in performance for less money. (e.g. Lenovo L440 with i7-4600m)
Banned
Jul 26, 2009
4315 posts
663 upvotes
Toronto
What are you talking about? The Acer laptop on the front page of RFD for $519 including shipping that uses the "lower tier" i5-4200U beats the T9300 by almost a score of 1000 (3732 vs 2823) in the Cinebench R10 32bit test. A "high end" quad core i7 like the i7-4700HQ gets 4895 in the same Cinebench benchmark. Will you feel a difference between the 4200U and your T9300? Nope. Word, Excel, Chrome, its all going to feel the same, because even my sister's P7350 can run everything just fine. In fact, unless your R61 has a dedicated graphics card, the integrated graphics card on the "lower tier" 4200U will destroy the integrated card in the garbage PM965 chipset, and you will get better gaming performance than on your T9300.

And the very fact that you are comparing a $1200 laptop from 7 years ago to a $500 laptop now is completely inane.

EDIT: Another thing, Intel's laptop CPU focus has shifted from producing the bestest and fastest, but instead has shifted into reducing power consumption for increased battery life, which is the right thing to do. When the regular Joe who buys his $500 laptop from Futureshop uses it for Word, excel, internet, and maybe Movie Maker, he's not going to see a difference between that and a 5 year old laptop. They are all going to perform just as well in those basic tasks. Why not focus on decreasing power consumption instead?

Double edit: My mistake, I forgot multithreaded Cinebench results. The T9300 gets 5k, 4200U gets 7K, and the 4700HQ gets I think 11k.
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Deal Addict
May 10, 2011
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Ottawa
Because CPU is seldom the bottle neck....

At home I am still using a 8 year old Dell 640m with Core 2 Duo T5600 and 2GB of RAM. At work I have a machine with Xeon E5 dual *processors* (not dual core!!! i.e. 32 virtual cores in total) with 32GB of RAM and SSD. To be honest for most general purposes (i.e. editing small Word document, Excel spreadsheet, web browsing etc) there isn't really a whole lot difference between the two....

People can talk about benchmarks all day long, but unless you are opening and closing your Excel 30 times per minute and refreshing your browser every 2 seconds, most of these benchmarks are completely irrelevant to normal home users.

So yes I am with you on this. There really isn't any burning reason to upgrade your PC as long as it is at least a core duo.
Deal Guru
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Oct 24, 2012
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op, your laptop is 7 years old and the cpu is 6 years old.

You have a time dilation issue.
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Feb 24, 2007
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Is this an issue of only able to afford a Corolla but wanting to drive a Ferrari?
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Apr 18, 2009
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i dunno if OP is a troll or feels he has some sense of entitlement like some princess....

a majority of laptops under $500 offer ram slots for upgrades on your own. and among them many do offer socketed cpus too for laptops configured with mainstream cpus (i have upgraded from an i3 to a quad core i7 on a acer laptop). the OP is just too lazy to do his own homework and research.

for the most part, only ultra-low-voltage cpus are soldered. but then back in the merom and penryn days of the c2d cpus, intel also offer soldered ULV cpus under the U and SU prefix. has OP complained about those too for being soldered?
Penalty Box
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Apr 25, 2013
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csi123 wrote: Because CPU is seldom the bottle neck....

At home I am still using a 8 year old Dell 640m with Core 2 Duo T5600 and 2GB of RAM. At work I have a machine with Xeon E5 dual *processors* (not dual core!!! i.e. 32 virtual cores in total) with 32GB of RAM and SSD. To be honest for most general purposes (i.e. editing small Word document, Excel spreadsheet, web browsing etc) there isn't really a whole lot difference between the two....

People can talk about benchmarks all day long, but unless you are opening and closing your Excel 30 times per minute and refreshing your browser every 2 seconds, most of these benchmarks are completely irrelevant to normal home users.

So yes I am with you on this. There really isn't any burning reason to upgrade your PC as long as it is at least a core duo.
Try to tell that to the 99% who thinks that newer is better and the more it cost is better, this is why the 1% is richer !
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Apr 18, 2009
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EdT586 wrote: Try to tell that to the 99% who thinks that newer is better and the more it cost is better, this is why the 1% is richer !
but does the 1% use c2d computers and nothing else?
Deal Guru
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Oct 24, 2012
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chroma_cg wrote: but does the 1% use c2d computers and nothing else?
Your train of thought fits the 99%
Deal Fanatic
Jun 17, 2013
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Montreal
My father has a T61. It is slow as snails compared to my sub $500 acer (i3) and my probook with a AMD phenom. By the time the T61 boots up I am already on RFD on the other two laptops.
Newbie
Jul 16, 2014
95 posts
3 upvotes
, ON
The slow boot time on that T61 probably has more to do with the speed of the boot drive than it does with the CPU. I have a single core Atom netbook that I put a SSD into and there was a dramatic improvement in boot time. If it was the processor that was the main bottleneck in boot time, a faster drive shouldn't have made a difference.
Deal Addict
Feb 11, 2007
1124 posts
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Whitby
Biskuits wrote: What do you mean by paying body parts? and what do you mean by trash CPUs? any examples?
Over $1000 for a quad core.

trash cpu: AMD C and E series, intel baytrail atom
Deal Expert
Oct 6, 2005
16872 posts
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pessimism wrote: trash cpu: AMD C and E series, intel baytrail atom
The Intel Baytrail Atom is a good processor - more than fast enough for most tasks and extremely low power consumption. Can your R61 run for 10 hours+ and is less than 1 lbs in weight?
Banned
Jul 26, 2009
4315 posts
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Toronto
i5-3570K 3.4GHz | ASUS DCII 7850 2Gb
8Gb DDR3 1333MHz | 128GB HyperX SSD + 1Tb HDD
Gigabyte Z77-DS3H | Ultra 650W PSU | Dell 22" 1920x1080 LED
The proud owner of a brand new ASUS T100!!!

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