PP Mguire
Build Guru
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- Fort Worth, Texas
Even Core 2 is getting rather obsolete unless you have one of the quads. For regular usage if it cost me 100 bucks to get an i3 over a Core 2 for a laptop I'd do it. Then again, I've owned or still own almost all of the chips in question. I have only owned 2 laptops, and the second one happened to be a P8400 based laptop with DDR3. Recently my fiance owned an Acer laptop for a brief time that had a SB based i3 with the same speed DDR3 both running HDDs. The Acer was significantly faster at what she does than the yesteryear gaming beast I had. All she does is get online, stream movies/anime, and chat with people as she doesn't really game anymore. Best part is, that particular laptop was only 250 bucks 4 months ago. Anybody in the market now has no reason to go any slower than a Core i first gen unless a comparable AMD laptop is cheaper. Then you run into power issues as they typically take more power.
Like I said, there's no reason to buy Core 2 based anything unless you get it for next to nothing as faster solutions are next to nothing now since tech outdates itself so quickly. Another thing to think about is, the new consoles are making multi-tasking such a demand and with those come 64bit native and multi-core native environments. Everything is about to get a lot more CPU demanding in the next couple of years making anything less than a quad rather obsolete for things that will run on more than 2 cores.
All that without even going into architectural details. The next step to that would be, 4k is literally right around the corner. My fiance's poor Q8200 struggles with that because the 7950GT I have in her machine doesn't/can't help.
Like I said, there's no reason to buy Core 2 based anything unless you get it for next to nothing as faster solutions are next to nothing now since tech outdates itself so quickly. Another thing to think about is, the new consoles are making multi-tasking such a demand and with those come 64bit native and multi-core native environments. Everything is about to get a lot more CPU demanding in the next couple of years making anything less than a quad rather obsolete for things that will run on more than 2 cores.
All that without even going into architectural details. The next step to that would be, 4k is literally right around the corner. My fiance's poor Q8200 struggles with that because the 7950GT I have in her machine doesn't/can't help.