I know most of you will say AMD, but please explain to me why?
I'm buying a notebook, Intel core 2 duo might be cheaper.
Where can I find bar graphs comparing them.

Please rate the following

(1)
AMD 64 X2 Mobile Technology - Athlon TK-53/TK-55 (1.70/1.80 GHz, 2x 256 KB L2 cache), supporting AMD PowerNow! technology and AMD HyperTransport technology
NVIDIA nForce 610M (MCP67-MV)

(2)
AMD Turion™ 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL 58 (1.90 GHz, 1 MB L2 cache), supporting AMD HyperTransport technology NVIDIA® nForce

(3)
Intel® Centrino® Duo mobile processor technology, featuring:
T5250 (2 MB L2 cache, 1.50 GHz, 667 MHz FSB), supporting Intel 64 architecture
Mobile Intel GM965 Express Chipset
Intel Wireless WiFi Link 3945ABG, 2 (dual-band quad-mode 802.11a/b/g/)

(4)
Intel® Centrino® Duo mobile processor technology, featuring:
Intel® Core™2 Duo processor T5450 (2 MB L2 cache, 1.66 GHz, 800 MHz FSB), supporting Intel 64 architecture Mobile Intel GM965 Express Chipset Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG4 (dual-band tri-mode 802.11a/b/g)

(5)
Intel® Centrino® Duo mobile processor technology, featuring: Intel® Core™2 Duo processor T7500(2.2GHz, 4M, 800FSB), T8300(2.4GHz, 3M, 800FSB), T9300(2.5GHz, 6M, 800FSB), T9500(2.6GHz, 6M, 800FSB), supporting Intel64 architecture
Mobile Intel GM965 Express chipset
Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG1, 2 (dual-band tri-mode 802.11a/b/g) Wi-Fi



I can't afford the last one. Any comments on nForce? Why does Intel have more L2 cache, how important is that. I once read that intel has higher clock speeds than AMD, but they are about the same in bench mark tests. How do I compare speed and through put. What do these alpha numeric strings mean?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

See if tomshardware.com has any ratings of these processors (it does have tons of charts/graphs). It's a good site with thorough knowledge of hardware and performance benchmarking. Also search around for specific latptop reviews, they might help more instead of just reviewing the individual components of the laptop.

Do you have the spec on the memory speed in those systems?

In theory, the Intel FSB design for memory access is slower than the AMD design. In practice, that might only be visible at the top memory speeds supported by the CPU.

In typical use a bigger L2 cache compensates for slower memory access. But it isn't a uniform effect. In some uses the memory speed will dominate regardless of L2 cache size, but more often the big difference in L2 cache size between Intel and AMD will overwhelm any memory speed difference and (at the same CPU speed) make the Intel chip deliver higher performance.

I don't know whether that is still true even in theory. I couldn't find any benchmarks comparing pure enough CPU speed to compare Intel to AMD current chips at similar clock speed. Most CPU intensive benchmarks are testing the L2 cache more than the CPU and thus heavily favor the chip with the larger L2 cache (which probably is realistic for typical use).

I found that it has benchmarks for the T7500 vs. the TL56 and TL60. Based on the specs, the TL58 would have results half way between the TL56 and TL60 on almost any benchmark, so you can easily infer a comparison between the T7500 and the TL58. But I couldn't find any benchmarks for the T5450 nor T5250 nor any model from which you could make a meaningful extrapolation to those.

In the Tom's Hardware benchmarks of T7500 vs. TL56 or TL60, all three had sub optimal memory. All three could make good use of DDR2-800 memory. But the T7500 and TL56 had DDR2-667 while the TL60 had DDR2-600. That would make many of the comparisons misleading unless those are the same memory speeds available to the OP (see my first question in this post).

In theory a TL56 or TL60 would improve more in changing from DDR2-667 to DDR2-800 than a T7500 would. But I found no actual benchmarks to back that up.
In the memory benchmark, the T7500 with 667 memory was a tiny bit better than the TL60 with 667 memory as you'd expect. If both had DDR2-800 memory, I'd expect the TL60 to beat the T7500.

In most CPU intensive benchmarks the T7500 was 25% to 40% faster than the extrapolated speed to a TL58, because most of those benchmarks are mixing CPU speed with L2 cache size and the four time larger cache (2x2MiB vs. 2x512KiB) makes more difference than the 16% difference in CPU clock.

In the gaming benchmarks, too many other system factors exist that can't be translated to the systems the OP is considering, so I don't know how to get any info from Tom's Hardware gaming benchmarks.

...the main answer is going to be, it depends what you want and it depends what you want it for. For some people, battery life is going to be the most important thing, and you can't tell that from what you have posted as some machines will have bigger (heavier!) batteries than others. For others, some kind of gaming performance will be the most important, and they will make a different decision.

I think since the intro of the Core 2 duo parts, for most people most of the time, Intel has been the default and only if the AMD shows an advantage for them do they go for the AMD part.

Laptop reviews are more difficult as its difficult to find reviews on every single model. But google (other search engines exist) is your friend!

...so the point of listing it was..? I can find many things I like that I can't or won't afford, so I either ignore it or wait 'till I can afford it (with computers, when the price has come down...). I note that you haven't listed any Centrino II machines. I'm guessing that they are not in the channels yet, but you may get some discounts on end of line Centrino I machines, if that makes a difference.

In general, cache does make a difference to performance, but a doubling of cache size doesn't make a night and day difference to performance, but it is a difference that is detectable in benchmarking. Why are you bothered?

Note that Intel and AMD archs aren't really directly comparable (in the way that they share cache between cores and other factors), so comparing cache sizes is slightly pointless as the answer may well be 'because it needs it'.

...and that was probably a correct statement, comparing desktop CPUs back at the Pentium D generation (in as much as it means anything - you could always find a very low clocked Celeron that wasn't competitive with a high end AMD in either performance or clock speed or the same comparison in reverse with a Sempron - but that's just irrelevant). It less true since the first Pentium mobile of about 5 years ago that Intel's mobile line was so dependant on high clock speeds for performance.

Not clear which strings you mean: if you mean T9300, for example, its a model number and you can look it up on a manufacturer site, which will give you clock speeds, fsb speeds and cache size/organisation. This info doesn't directly help you.

johnsfine wrote:
Intel have done a good (ok, good-ish) job of keeping the memory performance adequate to keep a less elegant design working. Part of the answer to doing that is to have a large cache size as the AMD design could be said to be more sophisticated. OTOH, you could consider the Intel core (the core part of core) to be more sophisticated, so you can't really choose directly based on sophistication. (And you probably shouldn't - if you are a performance freak, you should probably choose on the basis of delivered performance.)

Do you have the option of going into a computer store with a knopix disk and trying them out; remember that you are stuck with the keyboard and display 'forever' with a laptop, so if either of those is unpleasant to you, you shouldn't buy it just for a little more performance on benchmarks.

And then there is graphics performance. Mostly 'integrated' graphics are a bit cruddy; low performnace may not be an issue to you if you only want 2d; if you want gaming, it is not clear if any of these will meet your requirements.

Recently, AMD (ie, ATI as was) have been going toe to toe with Nvidia on gaming performance, with Intel (chipsets) being nowhere-ish. So, assuming that you want some (not loads of) graphics performance I'd be chosing between an AMD chipset and an Nvidia chipset, based on their support for Linux (for me that would be AMD, given the number of 'I can't get the Nvidia proprietary drivers working' posts, but YMMV).

We must be reading different posts.

Both my own experience and a large fraction of the posts I've read say the nvidia proprietary drivers are by the best video drivers available for Linux, beating both all open source drivers and all other proprietary.

Legal issues and motivation issues generally keep Linux distributions from providing as smooth an installation for proprietary drivers as they provide for open source drivers. So if you compare installation problems and/or beginner confusion level between any open source driver and any proprietary, you should expect the open source to do better. Installing Linux from a typical liveCD distribution is pretty easy (far more so than installing Windows). Maybe the nvidia proprietary drivers are the hardest single step in many Linux installs, but that doesn't mean that step is actually hard.

I think the install process on nvidia proprietary drivers is cleaner and easier than other proprietary drivers.

Open source nv drivers are pretty bad, maybe worse than open source amd/ati. When I've used them, they generally fail, but I never tried too hard to make them work before switching to proprietary. Posts I've read indicate that experience is pretty typical.

You should also check w/ both Intel and AMD's web sites to see if there are feature differences between the CPUs. For example, if you are going to be running Xen, VMWare, or VirtualBox they all take advantage of hardware features not found on all (at least last time I looked, but that was a few months ago) CPUs.

You also need to look at the subsystems of the laptop as well, for example if you are going to use a modem (at least having the ability to send/receive faxes is very handy esp. when traveling--send faxes to yourself at your hotel to get a draft quality printout and/or boarding pass!) be sure it is supported. What ports do you need? Some GPS's and handhelds need RS232 (although I have had good luck w/ a Belkin USB to RS232 dongle). What is the screen like? Does it have discrete graphics and if not do you need it (i.e. don't plan on playing anything more exciting than KDE Battleship w/ Intel) or think you might (e.g. using an external monitor w/ high resolution).

So many things go into the performance of a laptop that the CPU is not likely going to make one bit of difference. If there is a substantial price difference you will get a lot more bang out of discrete graphics or RAM--up to 2 GB, the benefit after that is only w/ special circumstances, I run KDE and many GTK+ apps like Firefox and Eclipse which hog memory and never come close to the 2GB limit. I get very good graphics w/ the ATI 9600 64MB graphics and was happy to end up w/ a slower CPU to pay for it.

Also, look at repair rates, warranty. Laptops get abused to no end and some brands stand out (Thinkpad, Apple).

Don't scrimp and put a non-laptop CPU in a laptop! This will suck your battery dry and burn a hole in your crotch next time you try to use your laptop on your lap. Intel seems to have a bigger selection for both low power and ultra low power CPUs.

So don't worry about the CPU too much. Other features are more important in most laptop setups.

The nv X11 driver does not fail for me. I have to switch to it to put a VMware virtual machine in full screen because the nvidia driver does not work.

Many distributions have different directory structure for installing and setting up drivers. It is up to the maintainers to create a script to install proprietary drivers. If they can not do it, these drivers are hard to install. Though Windows users trying to use Linux also complicates things because they expect the OS to do it for them. Linux is a hands on experience and Windows is a click and click experience.

I prefer nVidia graphics cards because nVidia supports more hardware. ATI only supports from 9800 series and up. ATI leaves previous series to the open source community to support.

About all the posts that Linux novice users can not install and setup their nVidia card is because they did not read the documentation and they did not use Google to search for some information. Setting up ATI cards will also have the same questions, but it will be even more complicated because their support is not as good as nVidia's.

The reason why to pick AMD is because they have the least amount of problems to boot up in Linux. In the past Core 2 Duo needs some work get them to boot into Linux. Also integrated graphics for AMD processors provides better performance and support compared to Intel processors. Third, Intel systems still are costly compared to AMD systems even though Intel processors are cheaper.

When buying a notebook computer, portability, performance and features should be considered. When going for budget, pre-configure can used, but may hurt one or all above issues. Picking what type of performance depends on the size of the notebook. Adding too many features changes the cost of the notebook computer. The features can also relate to either or both for portability and performance. Business notebook models have higher quality, so they can last longer and be reliable.

Bigger the battery means more capacity. Large capacity batteries makes the computer last longer between charges. However, larger the battery, the bulkier the notebook computer.

A good, high quality, great portability, and cheap notebook is Lenovo Thinkpad SL500. Its WiFi selection needs something better to make it easier to be used in Linux. I suggest complain to Lenovo to include Intel WiFi 3945 instead of the 5100 model. I think not anything faster than P8400.

Another good notebook is a HP Compaq 8510p. The use of a docking station is good plus.

MSI and ASUS notebooks provides a lot of options. Also they may provide an option to not include an OS.

These days, AMD Turion and AMD Athlon mobile processors are hard to find. A lot people really do not care what processor brand they get for their notebook computer. Companies just chooses the processor that seems to be the most popular. The performance of AMD mobile processors are not as good as Pentium M and not as good as Core 2 Duo. Also AMD mobile processors produces more heat and consumes more power. Probably key problem of a few selection of AMD mobile is businesses sees AMD mobile processors not provide long enough battery usage times.

IMHO, using a notebook computer for gaming use is just stupid. Yes it can do a little gaming, but not heavy. Notebooks computers gets hot even with the lowest model components, so do not spend your money on high performance parts for a notebook computer. It will soon over heat and shutdown before being used.

As a fan of AMD, I'll have to say those Intel notebooks you have will all work out of the box with no fiddling.

The 1.9GHz Turion should be comparable in performance to the 2.5GHz Intel (but look around for actual tests to show you). The NVidia nForce chipset was a nuisance a few years ago, but I believe there are now free drivers for most of its functions (such as the ethernet). If the AMD has an NVidia graphics chipset then you will also need the proprietary NVidia drivers, so that means fiddling after the install.

Other things to consider:
- what ports (and how many) does it have (USB1.1, USB2.0, firewire, SD/MMC slot, PCIX cardslot, CardBus slot, etc)
- how long does the battery go for
- is there a builtin wireless gizmo

When I bought a laptop about 18 months or so ago, the Turion was pretty awful with power consumption so I went for Intel - but that's ancient history so you'll have to look at the latest specs. I don't think you can really go wrong in choosing one CPU or the other though (unless power is still a problem for AMD) - they are both excellent CPUs.

Acer Aspire 4520 Series
AMD 64 X2 Mobile Technology - Athlon TK-53/TK-55 (1.70/1.80 GHz, 2x 256 KB L2 cache), supporting AMD PowerNow! technology and AMD HyperTransport technology
NVIDIA nForce 610M (MCP67-MV)
2 GB of DDR2 667 MHz
14.1" WXGA high-brightness TFT LCD, 1280 x 800 pixel resolution
NVIDIA GeForce 7000M
LAN: Gigabit Ethernet, Wake-on-LAN ready
WLAN1: Acer InviLink and 802.11b/g Wi-Fi CERTIFIED
WPAN1: Bluetooth 2.0+EDR (Enhanced Data Rate)

Operating System is Linux (saves me about $100 dollars and promotes open source).

Rs 30,500 / $750
Any comments?

Is Linux preinstalled and do all the peripherals work?
In particular, I would check the Gigabit adapter and get the chip actually used so I can check if there is a driver for it. The same goes for the WLAN adapter - if you can get the VendorID:ProductID pair then you can see what the current state of support is. For Bluetooth - isn't that just a protocol stack run over the Wireless?

I just read the following article:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Nvi...lure,6248.html
would the 'NVIDIA GeForce 7000M' be affected?

Yes Linux is pre-installed, I can only assume that all the peripherals are working. If not I'll take it back to them. Once their linux flavor is working, I'll copy the config files, and install the distro's I want.
Does that sound like a good plan?

Right now I'm looking at Tom's hardware guide.

keep posting, I might still change my mind on what to purchase.
Does anyone have any comments on the specs vs price that I mentioned above.

All NVidia GF8+ and later are definitely affected. I haven't seen any reports on the GF6 and GF7/mobile series - time to get google working for you. My GF6800 has been working fine for 3 years (admittedly it's not a notebook GPU).

Me thinks this question (OP) is backwards for a laptop.

First you need to figure out what you need (connections this/graphics that/screensize here/battery life there and so on...) and then settle on a laptop.

All those things and your budget will finally determine pretty much what you end up with.

With a desktop you'd usually start with a CPU and take it from there but you can cram pretty much anything you need into any desktop anytime later.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/deskto...iew-30954.html

The above guide at toms hardware is misleading on what to think about when buying a notebook computer. Again when buying a notebook the three issues to think about are portability, performance, and features/upgrades/options. What components you pick can affect performance and portability. A small notebook such as 15.4 inch can not handle high performance components. A 17 inch notebook can handle high components, but both a 15.4 inch and 17 inch has issues of moving the heat out of the notebook.

Author at toms hardware thinks a big screen helps watching DVD movies. This is false. Any movie can be watch on a screen as little as 3 inch. The quality of the movie depends on the quality of sound.

I suggest figure what you are going to use notebook computer for right now and think what kind features to support what you do and will do. My Dell Inspiron 1520 contains the following and provides me many possibilities.

Intel T7300 (2 X 2 GHz /w 4 MB L2 cache shared)
2 GB DDR2-667 (2 X 1 GB)
nVidia GeForce8 8400M GS
15.4 inch (1440x900; 18-bit color; 400:1 Brightness to Contrast ratio)
160 GB Fujitsu SATA
DVD Rewritable PATA
Intel WiFi 3945
34/54 ExpressCard
9-cell Li-ion battery

I got it for portability and functionality which actually does with a 4 hour to 6 hour battery life. I am able to setup multiple screens with the help of nvidia-settings, connect to wireless networks, watch DVD movies, play 3D games. One thing I do not like about it is the screen because it can not handle 24-bit color and at the time Dell did not provide an option for anti-glare or matte finish.

The mid-end and high-end models of the GeForce8 have the problems because of heat problems.

The Acer Aspire 4520 might be OK, but what if you want to use a certain Linux distribution. The WiFi may not work. I suggest Intel or Atheros for WiFi brands. Acer is low quality.

I think the HP model that I suggested is a good deal since it includes a coupon to lower the price further, it is a business model for reliability, advertised 16 million color LCD screen that is hard to find. One problem it comes with an ATI card. It might be hard to setup multiple screens. Though 3D graphics should work with either the proprietary or open source drivers.

I suggest X64-9520 at CyberPower PC (http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/). Uses an MSI MS-1634 notebook, so you should be OK for support from MSI.

Yesterday I bought the following laptop

Acer Aspire 4520

AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dual Core processor
TK57 (1.9 GHz, 2 x 256KB L2 cache)
NVIDIA Geforce 7000M
3GB RAM (1GB orginal + 'Transcend DDR2-667 2GB JetRam')
160 GB HDD
DVD-Super Multi DL
802.11b/g WLAN
Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
Gigabit Ethernet
Built in Webcam, microphone, 5 in 1 card reader

Is 'Transcend DDR2-667 2GB JetRam' memory good quality?
I paid Rs. 30,300 inclusive of all taxes (about $750), good or bad?
Is this a bad ass computer? Is it suitable for gaming?
Will I have problems supporting all the hardware in linux?

I have started a new thread, please click the following link
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...laptop-665964/
because this is far deviated from the original topic.