better deal?

starman100

Whats the better laptop deal?

Celeron 1.3 Ghz, 384 MB RAM, built-in graphics

OR

Pentium 1.7 GHz, 256 MB PC133 RAM, 16 MB dedicated graphics card, firewire, for an extra 150 Euro?

(everything else virtually identical on each machine)

strat

il let the experts handle this one

Kali

I know that early Pentium 4s with sdram are woefully slow... but it'd still be a good bit faster than that Celeron... although 150 quid on a graphics card and the Celeron would probably beat the P4 on nearly all graphics tests.

netman

The 1.3 celeron should perform at least as well as a 1.7 pentium 4 considering it's using SDRAM. The 1.3 Celerons are built on the Tualatin core, which is essentially Pentium 3, so apart from their younger brothers these new celerons have 256kb of L2 cache. It also dissipates less heat and uses less power, another good thing for a laptop.

And considering the performance of laptop hard drives that extra RAM could make a difference.

And lets face it, none of those two laptops will let you play the latest games 3D as you could on a desktop, the 16mb graphics card spells out "CRAP", the integrated one probably performs as well.

Here's a nice review showing exactly how poor P4 performs with PC133 memory:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q3/010702/index.html

At the end of the day, you make the choice. Firewire is a nice touch, if you think you'll ever use it. I'd go for longer battery life, less weight and slicker design. And quite frankly in office applications and web surfing you won't notice a difference between Pentium II and Pentium IV.

astrofool

kali, how can you spend 150 on a graphics card for a laptop ?

give details of the graphics card you get in each, the celeron would use FAR lass power and have better battery life, but the p4 would "probably" be a little faster when on mains, it really depends what way you want to use the laptop.

Got a p4 1.7 and 256ddr with a radeon 7500 dell laptop, and it runs wolfenstein sweet, that's all I'd want it to do anyway (tho ut2k3 might be a "bit" ambitious )

Gerry

The celeron would actually be faster on everything except 3d games. P4 is really crippled by pc133 ram, and thats not a northwood p4 either ( well it probably is not ). If you won't be playing much games, you will find that the celeron is a more practical machine, with much better battery life, as others have said.

If you can give links to the full specs of the 2 machines that would be helpful also.

Kali

Originally posted by astrofool
kali, how can you spend 150 on a graphics card for a laptop ?

oops.. totally didn't see that laptop bit