Which laptop is better?

[fbone33]

Acer: http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Acer-Aspire-15-6-Notebook-Quad-Core-AMD-2Ghz-4-GB-RAM-750-GB-HD-Win-8-64bit-/261806616820?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_2&hash=item3cf4e3f0f4

Asus:http://www.ebay.ca/itm/ASUS-15-6-Notebook-Intel-Core-i5-Matte-Screen-Win-7-Pro-500-GB-HD-4-GB-RAM-/261806574047?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_2&hash=item3cf4e349df


1. Which one is better purely on specs, taking into account that I have 8GB of DDR3L here at home that can replace the preloaded 4GB DDR3 of the one i choose to get. Again, do not consider price for this answer, purely specs.

2. Are these priced right?

 

[Calculagator]

1. The ASUS CPU is much better.
2. Prices seem very high to me considering that they are sold by some shady Ebayer when you could buy the same laptop for less from Amazon
http://www.amazon.ca/P550CA-XS51-CA-15-6-Inch-Notebook-Processor-Windows/dp/B00J5DU6UM

 

[fbone33]

1. The ASUS CPU is much better.
2. Prices seem very high to me considering that they are sold by some shady Ebayer when you could buy the same laptop for less from Amazon
http://www.amazon.ca/P550CA-XS51-CA-15-6-Inch-Notebook-Processor-Windows/dp/B00J5DU6UM

So the Intel dual core 1.8 Ghz is better than the AMD quad core 2 Ghz?

And I don't agree about your comment on the Ebay seller. He has 100% rating. And the starting bids on his ebay listings are much lower than retail prices for these laptops.

 

[Calculagator]

And I don't agree about your comment on the Ebay seller. He has 100% rating. And the starting bids on his ebay listings are much lower than retail prices for these laptops.

The Ebay seller may be a great person, but he only has 13 feedback for selling things--4 from the last year--no feedback from laptops ever. I don't mean any offense, but it looks suspicious that a person would have two "new" laptops to sell having never sold (or received no feedback for selling) any. There is a good chance that these laptops are used or are some sort of refurbished/store return. Because he is not an authorized seller, they rightly won't have any warrantee. They may be perfectly fine laptops, but he should be charging less considering his lack of reputation.

I spend a lot on ebay and mostly have had good experiences, but I always assume that people will take advantage of me if they can. I never spend money on electronics that I cannot afford to lose if things don't work.

Also- no pictures of the actual item he is selling is a huge red flag for individual sellers. You can't complain that it was not as pictured if there are no actual pictures listed.

 

[Calculagator]

So the Intel dual core 1.8 Ghz is better than the AMD quad core 2 Ghz?

Absolutely. AMD requires double the cores and faster clocks to keep up with Intel. In doing so they use a lot more power. The i5 can boost to 2.7 GHz. The i5 should have around 30%-80% better performance and use less power at the same time. The A6 may have a slightly better GPU, but it won't be good enough to make much difference: Neither laptop is any good for gaming.

 

[fbone33]

And I always thought the more cores the better. I want it as an everyday computer, not gaming. I do keep about 3 windows of firefox open at all times, and each one may have 50 tabs open at a time. Only way I can work. My current laptop can't handle it anymore. I assume the 8GB of RAM I have to put into one of these machines will help with that task

So the Intel dual core 1.8 Ghz is better than the AMD quad core 2 Ghz?

Absolutely. AMD requires double the cores and faster clocks to keep up with Intel. In doing so they use a lot more power. The i5 can boost to 2.7 GHz. The i5 should have around 30%-80% better performance and use less power at the same time. The A6 may have a slightly better GPU, but it won't be good enough to make much difference: Neither laptop is any good for gaming.

 

[Calculagator]

And I always thought the more cores the better.

A lot of people make that assumption and it is wrong. More cores is only better if they are the same sort of core.
Here are some basic benchmarks:
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-3337U-vs-AMD-A6-5200#performance
You can see the large performance edge of the i5 vs the A6.

The A6 you are looking at uses Kabini cores which are very weak in comparison to Intel's Ivy Bridge cores. The i5 you are looking at supports Hyperthreading which allows to to act like a quad-core for some tasks.

While the A6 can almost match the i5 at sustained multithreaded applications (like unzipping a huge file), the i5 has almost double the single-threaded performance which is most closely related to tasks like web-browsing.

*Yes, the extra memory will help with having so many tabs open.