Laptop suggestions - AMD vs Intel

snowysnowcones

snowysnowcones

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Apr 2, 2006
Messages
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Hi guys,
I typically keep up with hardware, but not really on the mobile side. My mom who is a school teacher is looking at purchasing a new laptop so she can have one here at home while she has her work one at...work. Anyway. Looking through BestBuy's weekly flyer she saw a Toshiba for $349. While this is an enticing price, I sort of steered her away from that, due to Intel's sub-par graphics performance. The way I see it, more and more computing will be graphics intensive in the future, with the greater adaption of HD video streaming and HTML 5, so she would want a laptop with say AMD's new A4 processor in it, no? What do you guys think about this advice? For future purposes things should become a bit more graphics intensive, right? She doesn't plan on upgrading the laptop until at least 5 years.
 
HD streaming and HTML 5 can both be easily handled by Intels current IGPs. That being said, the 4500M is kinda old, and doesn't support a lot of video decoding functions (which were reserved for the 4500MHD :p).
 
If you have the budget for it, avoid AMD and go with a low-end Sandy Bridge-based laptop, like something using the i3 2310M. Intel's current-generation integrated graphics aren't amazing, but they are quite adequate for general-purpose use, and in terms of CPU performance, a Sandy Bridge chip will blow almost any of AMD's current notebook offerings out of the water. Intel-based laptops also generally have better battery life than their AMD counterparts, although I don't know how much of an issue that would be for your mother.
 
Even the newer pentium dual cores with the hd2000 isn't too bad. You can find them under 500 easy.
 
Other than work, what else does she do or want to do with her laptop?

For web surfing and watching movies the following Toshiba should be adequate for $450. It has an Intel Core i3-2310M CPU which comes with the Intel HD 3000 graphics core. It has slightly better performance than the desktop Radeon HD 5450. Therefore, more than enough to watch movies.

http://www.bestbuy.com/nex/product/sku/2833814


If your mom is a fan of Fallout 3, then she may be disappointed since there are apparently some type of driver issues with the HD 3000 graphics core which prevents Fallout 3 from launching at the moment. :)

However, she'll be able to play Crysis with low graphic settings and no anti aliasing if she feels the need to shoot an annoying student. :)
 
If your mom is looking to spend less than $400, then the following HP Pavilion Laptop with an AMD A4 2.5GHz APU should be fine as well. That is a Llano APU which basically has an Athlon II core and integrated graphics core should be a little faster than the desktop Radeon HD 5450.

http://www.bestbuy.com/nex/product/sku/2715258
 
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