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Buying a new laptop

Risen

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Thanks for all the help guys. Right now I'm sitting on the fence between performance and budget. At the low end of ~$350 I'm looking at a used HP notebook with an i3-350m processor and typical intel HD (freaking assume ALL intel i-series laptops will exclude any manner of dedicated graphics below like... $800) but with a fast 7200rpm hard drive

http://bizsupport1.austin.hp.com/bi...=4150047&prodTypeId=321957&objectID=c02269391

or from about $450 to $500 I could get either an AMD A4 or AMD A6 laptop. These are all gaming capable computers with good GPUs, and the $500 A6 gateway computer in particular is a quad core cpu that can turbo boost up to 2.5ghz. A4 turbos to like 2.3, even though it's dual core. The A6's benchmark is like 3400, which is about 1000 above the A4 and i3 CPUs, and right next to the i5 2410m CPUs. I can also get an acer laptop with the i5 2410 for $500. Equal price as the A6 option, roughly equal benchmarks/ranking, but vastly better GPU with the A6. However, I have noticed in store that the intel chips do regular computer tasks quite a bit faster than the AMD A-series ones.

So... what should I go with?
 
G

Glycerine

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Go for the best possible computer you can afford.... it will most likely cost less in the long run.
 

Risen

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Mar 19, 2008
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I ended up getting this laptop:

http://slickdeals.net/?sdtid=318376...oc=01&skuId=2881042&slref=10&id=1218360613837

Quad core laptop, overclocked to 2.4Ghz (puting it above an i5 2410 in CPU benchmarks), USB 3.0, all the usual/average features... but the greatest thing is it has two GPUs, one integrated and one dedicated, that work together with AMD's crossfire technology. The result is an awesome gaming machine on a laptop costing only $450 brand new.
 
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