Processors

katies_mum

My daughter would like a new laptop for Christmas and we have found two at John Lewis (like the 2 year warranty) She also likes HP says the keyboard and mouse pad feel nice! We are of to John Lewis tomorrow to have a look, but I was after a bit of info beofre we go.

HP DV6-6B58SA at £599 Interl Core i5, 4GB RAM, 500GB with Altec Lansing speakers
The other is HP DV6-6B09SA at £529 AMB Fusion Quad-Core A6, 640GB, 6GB RAM also Altec Lansing speakers.
Both of these have lovely white cases.

Just a couple of questions please if you can help: how does the AMB Fusion Quad-core compare to i5. Is it worth the price difference?

Also some of the HP laptops now hav e Beats Audio sound system with quad speakers. She does listen to a lot of music - would one of these models be better than the above two.

As always I appreciate any help and advice you can give.

grizzly1911

Yep I second John Lewis, they are often very competitive an dthey also have a price match plus the guarantee:)

How old is your daughter? What will she use the laptop for?

The i5 is a high spec PC if it is just to browse/mooch/dable on.

Haven't heard the e beats "upgrade" but WMP gives pretty good results on its own. Really depends what you listen to it through. If it is integral would suggest it wouldn't be a patch on something linked to a 2.1 system giving much more depth - and power:eek: starting from £30.

I am biased towards Intel but I am sure that you will find an equal number that would go AMD.

My son has just gone to Uni we went i3, 4GB/500GB for around half the price and it is more than enough IMO, unless you are going to use intensive applications, gaming and such like. Guess what type of music he likes...

HP don't tend to get good reviews on these threads form what I have seen.

fwor

Unfortunately there's no simple answer to "which is better?".

On the face of it, the AMD has the greater processing power - if it's combined over all 4 cores - than the dual-core Intel.

However, that assumes that you can distribute the load evenly over all 4 processors, and in my experience that never happens in the real world (with my quad core, two cores are usually less than 1% busy most of the time).

If you benchmarked the two laptops I wouldn't be at all surprised to see one get best results on some types of test and the other the rest.

You don't say what she will use it for, but unless she's doing very CPU-intensive stuff I doubt she will notice the difference. If it were my choice, I'd save £70 and go with the AMD-based one.

katies_mum

Hi,

Thanks for replying. She currently has a HP pavillion which was a `special edition` bought 4 years ago and its been great (my desktop and netbook are also HP - just don`t like their printers). She listens and downloads music, photo`s - does homework, facebook etc (not gaming) The laptop is very very slow (I will keep it as it as a spare as it has a work programme on it which is so old it won`t load onto my desktop)

The one with beats audio is a lot more £££`s just sounds good I suppose as it has 4 little speakers and its beats! She has very good speakers in her room which she got for her ipod last Xmas.

My desktop is intel i3 and seems fine, but I`m not technical at all (as many on this forum will tell you).

The white ones are rather nice (its a white one she has at the moment with silver flashes on the lid) daren`t say how much it cost!

We are going to Liverpool tomorrow so will go and pester the lovely sales people in John Lewis!

Any more advice/comments would be appreciated.

PS I know we can get different makes / models but `madam` doesn`t like them and as its her main pressie want to get something she really wants.

katies_mum

Thanks for replying fwor, no one would know as they look identical. £75 could be put towards something else for her - I`m just wanting to find out as much as I can about them, will see which she decides on then throw in the £75 difference! if I need to. Whatever she gets will be a massive improvement on the old one.

NeverAgain_2

Keyboard feel is often overlooked, but it is important.

I take it the user won't be there at time of purchase.

A keyboard surround which doesn't flex and a generally solid case are good signs.

Both laptops are well over-specced for the use you have outlined.

A £350 HP or whichever make you fancy would do the job just as well.

katies_mum

Thanks, yes she will be there as want to get the one she likes. The first thing she tries is the keyboard and because of this does not like Sony, Toshiba or Acer! I`m sure JL will have cheaper ones for us to look at. I`m keeping an open mind, just wanted a bit of feedback / info on the specs and processors. I know the ones we have found are a bit £££ pricey. She is doing IT at school don`t know if they will need to do anything major during the next two years.

GRM

katies_mum wrote: »

Just a couple of questions please if you can help: how does the AMB Fusion Quad-core compare to i5. Is it worth the price difference?

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php can be a useful guide.

The i5 2430M scores 3454, ranked 212th.
The AMD A6-3410MX scores 3209, ranked 234th.

As fwor said, which comes out top will probably be down to the benchmark structure.

marms

Save the £75 and get her a decent set of speakers, for the uses you listed there won't be any difference between the two and for music a set of 2.1 speakers for about £30 or £40 will be 100 times better than any laptop speakers.

katies_mum

Thank you GRM, so not a lot in it! as far as I can see.

marms it will still save me money thanks, can you suggest any speakers worth looking at?

grizzly1911

http://www.amazon.co.uk/SPEEDLINK-Subwoofer-System-Black-SL-8209-BKWT/dp/B004K1EO1Q

We had the black version of these. They also do them with a lighter wood "effect" cabinet.

Pretty good for the money IMO, looked at all the others too for less and more.