Mobile Quad Question

[jdw5155]

I've speced what I believe to be a pretty nice laptop here with the Q9000 quad core processor clocked at 2.0 GHz and w/ 6MB L2 cache. The question is how much faster could I expect the Q9100 (2.26 GHz/12MB) or QX9300 (2.53Ghz/12MB) to be for processor intensive tasks?

Or, maybe put more succinctly, is the Q9100 worth the additional $500 or QX9300 worth the additional $750?

Thanks for any experiences you can share.

 

[B-Unit]

EGAD!

While 2.0Ghz is pretty meager, I would have a very hard time forking over $500 for 250Mhz. If you were going to step up, I would say you almost have to go all the way for the QX9300, but thats a pretty pricey upgrade too.

 

[hajpoj]

You might be better off "soft" overclocking your chip for specific apps or usage. What I mean is, software overclocking from windows temporarily because in multi-threaded apps you're hitting diminishing returns with slightly higher clocked cores that don't get fully used...

Overclocking and the faster clock speed in general are only needed for single-threaded apps in your situation. Single threaded app performance should be what you consider when deciding in this case.