2.5 dual core or 1.5 quad core???

Crazy_Saver

Hi everyone.
We are in the process of setting our son off to uni in September.
We are replacing his old laptop and would appreciate some advice.

He will be using it as his main TV/DVD viewer as well as for gaming and social networking And hopefully, some academic work :rotfl:
We have narrowed our search down to two, of which the first is the cheapest:

• HP Pavillion 15-e072sa
  AMD A4 5000M Quad core APU 1.5 GHz, 2MB Cache
  
  4 gig ram DDR3
  
  750 hard drive
  Dedicated graphics card AMD Radeon HD 8330

• AMD Dual Core A4 (4300M) 2.5GHz 1MB (L2 Cache
  AMD Dual core A4 4300M 2.5GHz 1MB (L2 cache)
  4 gig ram
  500 hard drive
  
  Integrated graphics AMD Radeon HD 7420G

Thank you in advance


Crazy Saver :beer:

Retrogamer

Out of those two, i would probably go with the dual core myself. 4 cores are only useful if the software being used is made to take advantage of them but even a that, 1.5ghz is slow with such a small cache. Neither will be good enough for much gaming though unless it's really old games.

John_Gray

Look up each of them in the CPU Benchmarks website!
Be careful; it's very easy to choose the wrong one(s).

Mankysteve

As above says going to need a fair bit more power to play games

Crazy_Saver

Thank you for your help.
Took everyone's advice on board and did even more research.

We ended up choosing a Lenovo IdeaPad Z585. Model 2617

My son is really pleased with it but it's taking some time to get used to Windows 8.

Thanks again everyone. :T

John_Gray

You might find it worth reading Lum's post about Windows 8 and the Metro interface.