Which would you pick?

chivs688

chivs688

chivs688

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27 Nov 2010
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706
Currently struggling to decide between two laptops, exact same price, with same HDD and RAM, at £400.

One has an i5-4288U, with just the integrated Intel 5100 graphics.

The other an i5-4210U, but has a AMD M265 Dedicated graphics card.

Comparing them separately, it seems like the 4288U is a fairly decent bit better than the 4210U.
And the M265 is a fairly decent bit better than the integrated Iris 5100 graphics.

I have a gaming PC, and a load of games, so it would be nice to be able to run a good few of them on the laptop, but I don't know whether the extra grunt from that GPU would be worth the drop in CPU performance for all the general tasks, and might not even bridge the gap between the two for the middleing-graphics games.

Will having that dedicated GPU help at all with general tasks? I know that's what the CPU is mainly for, but just wondering if having a GPU in there helps out the CPU at times when doing all sorts of things on the laptop, potentially bridging the gap that the 4288U has ahead of the lesser 4210U.?

Any help much appreciated, thanks.
 
Hard to say, however for gaming it's obviously better to have a dedicated GPU. I'm interested to know what notebooks these are. Could you let me know the Brand/Model? :P
 
Yeah, I mean I will do a bit of gaming, but I'm pretty fussy about fps so I'd only ever play the simple graphics games on the laptop as I wouldn't want to play any hovering under 60fps, so the GPU may actually be a bit wasted.. which was why I was wondering if it would have any benefit in general tasks which could make up for the weaker CPU in some cases.

And sure, its the Dell Inspiron 15R, 5547. And the HP Pavilion 15-p151sa. (both have discount codes to make them £400)

Also wondering whether it might be worth paying £45 extra and getting the i7-4510U in the Dell... although that's only marginally better than the i5 and not much closer to the 4288U.
 
Just found this on a review site:

"The issue: Although the GPU would actually be capable of using its DDR3 memory via a 128-bit interface, Dell uses the slower, but cheaper variant with a 64-bit memory interface. This leads to a noticeable difference in terms of performance"

Which according to that review site means as difference "of approx. 20 fps when playing BioShock Infinite.".

So the Dell isn't using the GPU nearly as well as it should be, and so would probably end up not being all that useful over the integrated 5100 graphics right...?

So annoying (although good) to discover this as I was about to decide on the Dell, now I'm back to not being sure..
 
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