Hello, I'm in the market for a 15.6" laptop for no more then $400.. it will be used for fast and responsive web browsing with light gaming. (runescape only) battery life around 4-6hrs shouldi get AMD E 350? or core i3 2310 with HD 3000? any other suggestions?
Bought this for the wife,got some good reviews(not received as yet) and here is a deal on TD for a Quadcore Laptop
Honestly id go with the i3/hd 3000 its far better performance than the E350 and apu (which I have). The E350 is no slouch but seeing benchmarks etc the intel does win out generally. The nice thing about the APU is the drivers are standard AMD catalysts so get updated frequently. I'm not sure how all gaming is with the Intel graphics drivers though and whether there are any issues.
Two I suggest off hand: Toshiba C655-S5212 Asus K53E-BBR5 Both priced at Best Buys for $379.99 iCore3-2310, Intel HD3000 VGA, HM65 Chipset Comes with Windows 7 64bit Home Premium. Toshiba is considerably fast, and I was surprised at the Index of Windows giving it 5.3 with bloatware. I tested it, and sure enough it was pretty quick for a 2.1Ghz CPU. Toshiba was sold out by the time I got around to it. I got the Asus K53E BBR5 with the same hardware specs although the Toshiba has better board with Japanese parts inside, so the quality is considerably better. Japanese have precision in mind and are sticklers for perfection, considerably more than the Taiwanese counterparts. This Asus K53E, I had to do a wipe drive and recovery because the lamo manufacturing person was slack in installing the softwares in question. After a hard recovery, and the subsequent updating of drivers and Windows, and installing a 7200RPM Western Digital Scorpio Black Sata drive, plus ordered 8GB Ram Upgrade for 53US, the score jumped up to 5.8 not bad for a $379.99 laptop. So there you go. Next is to upgrade the CPU to iCore 5 and whatever else it needs to better equip the CPU with. This is a K53E series which is able to run,--I believe-- all the latest Intel 'i-series' CPUs all the way upto i7 is what is listed on the website. So it should in theory be able to accommodate the i5 run it smoothly. My three cents for your future purchase.
For $400 you are going to be buying the cheap'n'nasty end of the new market. I'd sacrifice some i series intel for a second hand Thinkpad for less money I'm in the UK but Ebay turns up these T400's around the $400 mark http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-Thin...02430545?pt=Laptops_Nov05&hash=item3368d9b651 http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-ThinkPa...52390613?pt=Laptops_Nov05&hash=item4aae5511d5 TBH for what you want to do with the unit a T61 would do, although you might not want Vista..... http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-ThinkPa...71809042?pt=Laptops_Nov05&hash=item1c1e8f8f12 http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-Lenovo-...39536678?pt=Laptops_Nov05&hash=item336b0fe826 Obviously check the exact auctions yourself, but I can vouch for the Thinkpad T series as quality machine that last.
