AMD A9 9420 vs A10 9620?

[brushyhillguide]

My 15 year old son wants a laptop for Christmas. He’d like to do some little YouTube videos and other mid-teens social media nonsense. Lol! We can’t afford much this year so I’m looking at a HP 15z that’s on sale for around $335 but theres a $50 upgrade to the A10 chip. Just wondering if there’s any real benefit to the upgrade? He’s not a big gamer and, if he does play video games, it’s on his PlayStation. So, this will surely be used mainly for social media, YouTube and light video editing, music storage and downloading, web surfing and email. Which processor should I go with?

If anyone has another cheap laptop (sub $400) option that’d be better, please feel free to share!

Thanks so much!

 

[Alec Lockhart]

I would check this one out first: https://www.amazon.com/Acer-E5-575-33BM-15-6-Inch-Notebook-Generation/dp/B01K1IO3QW/ref=sr_1_4?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1512751963&sr=1-4&keywords=Laptops

I don't dislike AMD mobile CPUs, however I've had more luck with Intel's. Plus Acer is a great budget laptop brand.

The i3-7200U would be a great chip for mobile browsing, it gets a better performance score and you can always trust that Intel will keep up to date on mobile drivers. AMD isn't bad nowadays but they have a habit of leaving for years in a row unfortunately. Let me know what you think!

 

[TJ Hooker]

The A10 gets you twice the CPU cores (4 vs 2) and ~double the GPU power. Just between those two options, I think it's worth the extra $50 for the better specs.

But as said above, Intel CPUs tend to outperform all of AMDs offerings other than their very latest stuff (which probably isn't available for the budget you're looking for yet).

 

[delaro]

$300-$400 range laptops have some trade-offs that can be irritating.. like low res screens, 4 GB of RAM "Sucks for Editing"and Slow Drives.

Things to consider for budget Laptops

8 Gigs of RAM < You don't want 4Gigs for Video editiing since just turning the thing on you would be using nearly 50%.

HD620 uses System Memory so 4Gigs of RAM will fill even faster

R7 Graphics can be slower or faster than a HD620 depending on the model of APU and they also have Dedicated VRAM of 2-4Gigs.

APU all of them are slower overall than a i3 mobile but they are not unusable.

Screen resolution.. 1366×768 this is common for sub $400 and below Laptops and to me.. very dim and ugly but that is part of the sacrifice.

5400 rpm drives.... it's..sluggish. 120GB SSD vs 500 GB or 1TB slow Spinner.

Brand and amount of Bloatware.. Asus and Lenovo have a ton of shit programs running in the background that you will never use.

Something to look into overall.