Hi,

I want to replace my 3 years old DELL laptop (P4 3 GHz, 512 MB RAM) with a new one (Inspiron 1501):

Turion 64 X2 TL56
2 GB DDR2 RAM 533
120 GB HDD 5400 RPM
8X DVD+/-RW
ATI Radeon® Xpress 1150 256MB HyperMemory
15.4" Wide Screen XGA TFT Display with TrueLife™ 1280x800

The new one costs approx. 650 EUR + VAT.

I'm just wondering how fast is the TL52 comparing to the old P4@3GHz...
Any thoughts?

Thanks.

Well, it is a dual core, and that will increase the speed of the "feel" of your experience. It will pretty much be like having a dual core version or your p4 clocked at 3.6ghz. Plus the laptop is much better with 2gigs of ram vs 512mb and so on, so i'd say a big improvment.

A TL56 runs at 1.8 GHz if I'm not wrong and in single threaded software you will get no performance advantage at all; I've had an Athlon64 3000+ (1.8GHz) and sometimes it slightly lags behind 3GHz a P4 (media encoding etc) and sometimes it's ahead (games, scientific and computational software).
The advantage you get is:
-the added 80% of performance of the second core
-longer battery life (mobile P4s are really battery hungry as you might know)
-better and larger RAM as corvetteguy said

So at the end; go for this upgrade if you really feel your actual laptop is missing something.

OK, thank you.

I think I'll buy it.

Ouch, a Pentium 4 right on your lap... *bad thoughts*

What's your budget for a new laptop. Core Duos are going really cheap out the door (Core Duo, not Core 2 Duo).

Yup, it should be faster than a p4, just because the p4s really sucked 8O and that any athlon 64 could demolish a p4, I think this should be a nice step up, but I'd go with the core duo instead if I were you, those outperform the turon x2s, and the performance difference from teh core duo and core 2 duo mobile is roughly 10% (core 2 duo was essentially based off of core duo to some extent, if know some things about intel, then you'd know that intel had two main processor teams, a desktop one that kept pushing for higher ghz, a mobile one that had the right idea and went for efficiency, and intel finally realized that the efficiency team was far more successful at benchmarks, so they decided to go that way, not the best explanation, but it enough in case you were wondering why I say core duo over core 2 for pricing reasons)

I have to agree. If you can find a system with similar specs based around the Core CPU's, go for it. If the AMD system is significantly cheaper, go for it. Either way, you'll notice an improvement.

Actually, I think the hdd would be so much of a bottleneck, that for only real cpu power applications would you notice a difference, so boot times would be the same, but you would notice a considerable difference for most applications that aren't hdd related severely

I don't think the hard drive bottleneck will be a huge issue when comparing the performance. Any newer model should have a newer SATA HDD, which when compared to a 3 year old IDE model should have improved seek times and data transfer bandwidth.

our current HDD hardware is incredibly slow compared to DRAM. Thus, little or no performance hit while using 2 GB of ram. Does nto matter if HDD is 5400 RPM.

TY

8) I have switched from 1gb to 2gb ram and did not notice a single difference at all in windows, even getting a faster processor didn't make much of a difference because of my hdd, in games there was some difference, but boot times and app load times remained the same, and that's mainly what I care about since I already have enough power with my cpu. Though there is zram on the way some time down the road if that makes a difference

I noticed a huge difference going from 1GB to 2GB in games, especially in games like BF2142, Command and Conquer and FEAR.

I hear the bf games can use the 2gb (mainly 2 and 2142/1942) some other games, but for everyday windows activities, I don't notice much of a difference, thinking about buying a used scsi drive from ebay, I know it's taking a chacne, but I can't afford a raptor, so why not at least try one? I found a few nice ones for cheap, and then I'll just need an scsi controller and I'm set 8)

ditto

The difference in performance is SOLELY that of a new drive versus one that is 3 years old. A new SATA and IDE drive of the same capacity and rotational speed will perform exactly the same as there is nothing special about SATA that makes it work better than IDE, unless you perhaps run a server and SATA-300's NCQ could help out. SATA has higher possible throughput capabilities, but notebook drives are so puny that the very fastest one won't even come close to saturating an IDE connection. Desktop drives are a little closer to saturating the 133 MB/sec barrier of PATA IDE, but they're still quite a bit away.