I need to buy a laptop but I’m completely out of touch with which processors are best these days.

Most of the laptops seem to be intel pentium,core i3 or AMD’s. Could any one give a dummy’s guide to which order thy’re in worst to best?

cheers
ps we’re looking at a pretty cheap laptop btw

If you can get an i3 cheap that will be fine.

Dont bother with a Pentium, old and slow, best avoided.

AMD are behind the game too.

Basically, get a 2nd generation i3 processor in a laptop for under £400 and you’ll be laughing. The performance difference between an i3 and a Pentium will be night and day. An i5 would be lovely also, but slightly more expensive.

Pentium are not that old or slow, but go for the I3.

You can get an i5 CPU’d laptop for under £400 at Dabs. Lenovo (used to be IBM) for £450.

i3s are typically £280 ish on Dell outlet

Get a “scratch & dent” for best value. Had two in the last year, an i3 15″ Inspiron and an i7 17″ Studio. Couldn’t find a mark on either. 🙂

Comet are currently selling a Fujitsu Siemens with an i3-2310M processor, 4GB of RAM, 500GB HD, reduced from £499 to £349.

If I needed a cheap laptop right now, that’s where my money would go…

worth getting the i5 if you can.

Yeah but it’s £100 more for an i5, and the new Sandy Bridge i3’s are still faster than first gen i5’s anyway!

I have a new i3 / 6GB / 1GB graphics Lenovo from saveonlaptops – ace maching, fast as a fast thing for 99% of stuff, even edited up a movie last week on it and it coped fine.

I booked-marked this not so long ago to try and sort the wheat from the chaff but not sure if laptop ones are different, there seems to be a few i3s of varying spec:

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=AMD+Athlon+II+P320+Dual-Core

Yeah, there are lots of i3’s, but most are desktop processors, and some are the older generation.

The laptop one you want is the i3-2310M… It’s the 2.1Ghz Sandy Bridge processor, and scores 2599 on CPU Bench… Or there’s the 2330M Which is a 2.2Ghz version of the same.