Which of these 2 laptops is better?

[ericdude88]

Hi I am going to college and am getting a laptop. I am currently choosing between 2 laptops, both are Acer and same price.

Acer Aspire TimelineX AS4830T-6678: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2008029&CatId=4938


Acer Aspire TimelineX AS5560G-7809 : http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2889186&CatId=4938

I will mainly watch youtube, skype, do schoolwork, and play games (DayZ, Wargame-EE, Total War).

Which one is better?

Few pros and cons that I've personally found:

The first laptop that I listed has a better GPU (the 7670m,its only advantage over the other laptop, but since i wanna game this one is big). The second one has however, 1 LB less weight, 2x the battery life (8 hrs vs 4 hrs) and a faster CPU the I3-2370M (Though I'm not sure of this, i got all my info from passmark). There are contradictions out there that say that the AMD 3420m quad core of the first laptop is actually better than the i3 2370M of the second. Which one is ACTUALLY better? And is a better CPU more important for me in this situation or is a better GPU more worth it?

Thanks in advance for all help!!

 

[nekulturny]

Neither are really ideal for "Gaming computers" (laptops never are if you ask me)., but yes, the Trinity (first laptop) is going to be the better choice. Passmark however is a very useless benchmarking website. You'll be fine with MMORPGs though, they're usually pretty flexible in terms of your system specs, there aren't mean you can't find a setting that will give you smooth gameplay.

As far as the i3 or the trinity in terms of CPU power, actually, the Trinity quad holds its own pretty well against i3 Sandy Bridge, at least in the desktop. But for mobile power, no, you really don't need a particularly powerful CPU I shouldn't think.

My opinion will fall on the first one. I'm thinking about a Trinity laptop myself to replace my 2 crappy older laptops for college.I have a Dell XPS M1530 with a Core2Quad and an Nvidia 8 series, its actually still pretty decent in terms of performance but its the nvidia chip that literally melts that they got sued over. and then I have an Acer with a single core Athlon thats a complete turd.

 

[nekulturny]

Edit: Excuse me, that AMD CPU is a Llano, not the new Trinity. Still doesn't change much of what I said however. But I'd ask what is your maximum budget for a laptop?

 

[ericdude88]

Hey thanks for reply. I don't really have a budget, but I want to keep the price as low as possible.

Earlier I was actually looking at this laptop: http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Satellite-L855D-S5242-15-6-Inch-Mercury/dp/B008482XOG/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1345439430&sr=8-2&keywords=gaming+laptop+toshiba

Though Passmark scores its GPU (7640G) lower than the 7670M of the Acer, it (the Toshiba)has a CPU almost twice as good in terms of performance over the A-6 3240M of the Acer. But since you say Passmark is unreliable, how would you rate the A-6 3420M processor compared to the A-8-4500m 2.8 GhZ quad of the Toshiba? And what's a more reliable benchmark site?

Thanks for all your help and yea you have me leaning towards the Acer with the better GPU and Llano CPU.

 

[ericdude88]

Oh, and I was just wondering if the onboard graphics card on the CPU of a laptop will combine and work together with the one that's built in? For example on the Acer with the A6-3420M processor, it has a 7670M GPU put into it, but from what i've heard the A6-3420M CPU itself also has a Radeon 6520G card integrated into it. Do the 6520G and 7670M combine and work together or does the 6520G just deactivate when I use the laptop with 7670M?

 

[nekulturny]

You're welcome, better benchmarking sites uhh for notebooks, good question honestly lol. I don't know of any off hand honestly.

I googled this site which has a "performance scale" as far as models to look at
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1931/5/

Yes, the do "combine" in crossfire mode. This is why they're paired together to doubleup on the graphics power. I was looking at an HP with an A8-4500M myself from HP, although the one you found from Toshiba is cheaper with the same APU.

This is what I was thinking about:
http://www.shopping.hp.com/en_US/home-office/-/products/Laptops/HP-Pavilion/B5S11UA?HP-Pavilion-dv6-7010us-Entertainment-Notebook-PC

The A8 is definitely going to outperform the A6 in graphical performance and CPU performance for the most part. So Passmark has that right to an extent.

Here is a bench Tom's did of the Llano vs Trinity. Now remember these are benches of Desktop grade ones, so mobile results will be different, but the results should be fairly consistent based on architecture vs architecture. The Llanos are based on the older K10 architecture (like Phenom II and Athlon IIs) the Trinity is based on PileDriver, which is an upgraded version of Bulldozer (AMD FX CPUs).

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a10-5800k-a8-5600k-a6-5400k,3224-8.html

And this is one they did (again desktop grade CPUs) with Trinity, Llano and Intel i3

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a10-5800k-a8-5600k-trinity-apu,3241-3.html

You can see that there are some things the Trinity does trip up a bit (single core applications typically), but still fairly smooth. The gaming benches though put Trinity out of i3's league entirely.

 

[ericdude88]

Thanks for the info. But I have another question now. Since the GPUs actually pile up and crossfire (even though they're different?) and the Acer would theoretically have both a 6520G that's prebuilt into its A6 along with a 7670M, wouldn't it put the 400$ acer above that 580$ toshiba with its A8 and its onboard 7640G in terms of GPU power? Seeing as how the toshiba only has 1 7640G (which according to passmark is inferior to the 7670M) while the Acer has 2, the aforementioned 7670M AND the 6520G onboard GPU.

And do you think that the Toshiba is worth the extra 180$ over the Acer with the A6?

 

[soundguruman]

I would never buy a toshiba anything.

 

[nekulturny]

I would never buy a toshiba anything.

I've never heard anything bad about Toshiba laptops honestly. I will say though that my Acer laptop I had to send back 3 times to their repair center because of problems with it. I'll probably never buy another Acer laptop again.

Thanks for the info. But I have another question now. Since the GPUs actually pile up and crossfire (even though they're different?) and the Acer would theoretically have both a 6520G that's prebuilt into its A6 along with a 7670M, wouldn't it put the 400$ acer above that 580$ toshiba with its A8 and its onboard 7640G in terms of GPU power? Seeing as how the toshiba only has 1 7640G (which according to passmark is inferior to the 7670M) while the Acer has 2, the aforementioned 7670M AND the 6520G onboard GPU.

And do you think that the Toshiba is worth the extra 180$ over the Acer with the A6?

I'm not entirely sure how that all works out, but I'm going to say I *think* the Toshiba one is still going to be the better performer. I'm 99% sure.

 

[nekulturny]

Just for the sake of information, I'll share my experiences with the Acer laptop. And to be fair, I'm sure its probably a freak thing, but what the hell? BTW at the time all this happened I didn't know as much about computers as I do now. (I'm a 2nd year tech student currently, this was way before going back to college was even considered)

- Its an Acer Aspire 5517
- 2 weeks after buying it, the power brick died. Acer required me to ship the laptop at my own expense to their repair center (they wouldn't just take my word for it that the brick was dead, they wanted the whole laptop) Total time was about 3 weeks without the laptop.

-Now, yes, Acer technically pays for the shipping, but the system they use, there was no local shipping facility that accepted their RMA vouchers via Fedex. They refused to provide me another means, so I had to pay $35 bucks to ship.

- A month later, I partitioned the hard drive to have a dual boot of Ubuntu and Win7. I forget why, but I attempted to do a system restore to the factory defaults on the Win7. Totally wiped the hard drive, and the laptop didn't ship with proper recovery software. I think Acer even got a class action suit over it. So again, had to send the laptop back at my own expense without reimbursement, and another 3 weeks without the laptop.

- Few months down the road, headphone port came loose. So external speakers and headphones sound staticy. (staticky? Full of static? lol). Called them up, of course they say its out of warranty now, but they'll fix it as a courtesy if I ship it to them, once again at my own expense. I told them bullshit, they sold me this heap of crap I want a new laptop altogether, I'm tired of this.. Of course you probably know how that ended. Me raging at some poor call center woman and then just bending over and taking it. :lol:

 

[ericdude88]

Best answer selected by ericdude88.