Phenom 2 N950 vs Core i5 460M

[raza715]

Hello tomshardware community!
I am going to buy a laptop which can handle some gaming also and budget is under 800$ and fine battery timings as well (2.30 hours atleast on echo) so dont recoomend me Toshiba Qosmio. I did alot of research and narrowed down my options to these two laptops from newegg. Both have 1gb ddr3 5650 but difference b/w them is that one have AMD Phenom Quad Core N950 and other have Core i5 460M dual core.
As far as ideal condition is concerned the AMD phenom should be much better because of true Quad cores(4 cores , 4 threads) vs Core i5(2 cores , 4 threads) but now a days most applications dont use all four cores (specially games) like crysis and many others didnt use quad core at all infact it gave better performance on E8400 vs Q6600 unlike Resident evil 5, Dragon Age origins,Battlefield Bad Company 2, Far cry 2 and very few other games.
So what do you guys suggest considering the performance(benchmarks) and durability(heating issues and battery standby) what should i buy, i am really confuse about this matter as for present Core i5 460M is better vs N950 because of the above mentioned fact but N950 can be better for future. What do you guys recommend?

1.http/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834115864
2.http/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834115866


Regards
rAzA

 

[christiangordon]

I would go with the i5 laptop. You will see just a bit of a performance boost over the n950

 

[darkchazz]

What makes you think todays games don't use 4 cores ??!!
maybe 2 years ago yes , but nowadays most games are well optimized for quad cores...
Besides, 4 cores = future proof.

 

[raza715]

yeah i was also thinking same. I should go with future=N950

 

[raza715]

I would go with the i5 laptop. You will see just a bit of a performance boost over the n950

Yeah i know, as most of the applications dont use 4 cores, thats why.

 

[raza715]

I just checked out that games with quad core optimizations also working fine on core i5 460 due to the benefit of l3 cache and turbo boost but on the other hand n950 dont perform on single threaded applications

 

[raza715]

Best answer selected by raza715.