Dell 5150 Dual Core 2.8GHz inc 19" LCD Monitor & Free Printer £429 (merged)

Roger_Rampant wrote:

My understanding is that you would only obtain that sort of enormous performance benefit when using software that has been designed to work with dual core processors, or if you happened to be running two CPU-intensive tasks simultaneously

I agree. If you are into video editing or 3D rendering and have some professional (multi-threaded) software like Adobe Premiere then you will notice a big improvment in rendering times. If its mostly for games then the single core 3Ghz will be better.

Personally, I normally have a few things running concurrently e.g. I may be developing at the same time as converting an mpeg2 TV programme to mpeg4 for use on my pocketPC. For me, dual-core makes more sense.

But now I'm trying to decide whether to cancel my £439 5150 that I ordered last night and buy the £399 one this morning that is exactly the same except for the 80Gb HD.

borgs wrote:

But now I'm trying to decide whether to cancel my £439 5150 that I ordered last night and buy the £399 one this morning that is exactly the same except for the 80Gb HD.

Never saw the £439 offer but the £399 one I'm looking at now (D04516a) doesn't seem to have any method of generating CDs.
Seems only to have a 16 x DVD ROM in it !!!!

RE the DUAL CORE etc. yes I agree and it probably will not make that much difference to me (at this minute anyway) but would be nice to know that the motherboard is not already actually running the fastest CPU it can, and that there is room to upgrade to a faster HT or a DT if I want to.

Kilty wrote:

Pioneer DVD writers can be had for £30, so if it has a bigger HDD than the £439 model it is still a better buy....

But the £399 D04516a on my screen ONLY has an 80GB disc on it !!

mrm3 wrote:

Same position exactly.

Let me know what you do.

EDIT: Actually slightly different. I ordered both. Not sure which one to cancel.

Are they? I thought it was just the HD that was different - have I missed something? Edit - I misunderstood your slightly different part - you were referring to the fact that you'd ordered both weren't you.

I'm not too bothered about the extra 80Gb as I've already got an IDE 80Gb to go in it and you can get an equivalent 200gb HD with 8mb cache / 7200rpm for £55 from eBuyer! So you can get an extra 120gb of space over the 160gb for about fifteen quid extra - if you need the space.

I got the £399 offer the week b4, but with a worse spec, ie. the HD was 80gb and the RAM was only 512MB! :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: now I can complain since the price is the same as last weeks with double memory!