Atom/Celeron Processor Performance

[Cache]

Just wondered what peoples thoughts on the Atom and Celeron processors that are floating around in various cheap/£200ish laptops at the moment? I realise they don't compare to I3/I5 but for general laptop trolley type usage do people find them ok?

 

Just trying to decide what route we go....

 

thanks!

Edited September 4, 2015 by Cache

[Steve21]

Find with all the "mobile-like" ones they're pretty terrible to open programs, but once open they run ok-ish for generic processing/browsing etc. Generally we're finding i3's for about £230~ though unless you're expecting a lot of warranty etc (Guess brand wise too)

 

Steve

[3s-gtech]

They're Bay Trail and Cherry Trail units. Very useable, they're a little RAM starved in many of these units, I don't like stuff with less than 4GB now for school. They're up to the standards of older Core 2 Duo and AMD low voltage stuff like the E350 and E1 series. Good battery life too.

 

We tend to buy the cheap Lenovo B series units for this purpose, i3 powered and good value.

[Cache]

Thanks for the replys, much appreciated.

 

I'm not looking for huge amounts to be honest, when I've been looking I've just not really come across much under £250 recently but I've only been doing general browsing not huge investigations into it, but the £250 price point doesn't fit in with the budget I have available for the quantity I need if that all makes sense?

[ITGURU]

Our English department have 60 Acer netbooks which are INTEL CELERON 1017U @ 1.60GHZ with wireless N, 4GB and these cost us £213 each.

I thought they would be quite slow, but actually find them quite nippy for what they are. A class set of 30 can get booted up and logged on within 5 minutes as use a mandatory profile which is 3-4 megs in size.

As long as you don't want to run phootshop or cad, they are perfect for office and internet applications.

[newpersn]

I must say we normally order i3 as a minimum. But with the big price difference between celeron and i3 laptops now with falling IT budgets we gotta do what we can.

 

I'm trying to see if our network manger will order a celeron or a pentuim laptop to see if there is much difference.

[SHimmer45]

SSD will help them no end as the problem most people find on these is the inital loading times/response.

they wont have as long a shelf life tbh.

is there much of a price difference if you went for pentium based laptops over celeron / atoms

[Cache]

Don't know to be honest, £150 - £230 seems to be the Atom/Celeron bracket and a quick glance seems £190-£230 is the Pentium bracket - is the Pentium performance much better then the Atom/Celeron type?

 

I'm open to anything, I've just not paid a lot of attention to it recently because of other concerns & priorities.

[3s-gtech]

Pentiums tend to be quad core, Celerons dual, Atoms are lower power and tend to be clocked down.

 

Just been using a Lenovo G50 with the Celeron N3050, impressive little machine and has 4GB of RAM. Only £140 refurbed from Argos.

[CyberNerd]

If you are looking for something for general browsing and a few apps you can't go wrong with Chromebooks.

You'll get a rugged touchscreen yoga (tablet and laptop) that was designed for education for £250. Boot up is about 10 seconds ( that is to say logged in and on the internet, the boot is about 6!). Really good performance since the kernel is designed for the hardware, and comes with enterprise grade 802.11ac. The management capabilities are very good too with GAFE. Or pay an extra £80 and slow it down with windows.

 

ThinkPad Yoga 11e Chromebook | Lenovo Â| Lenovo UK

[Fazza]

In my experience, if you buy cheep you often end up having to buy twice so lose out on a lot of money.

 

If you've found a particular laptop you're interested in then as one of your suppliers if they can get hold of a demo one for you so you can try them out with your software before going ahead and ordering a load of them.

 

We've done this loads of times in the past and always get a demo one to play with before we buy anything. Not only with laptops, we've had loan thin-clients and wireless bridges loaned to us in the past before we went ahead with any purchases.

[matt40k]

I personal got a cheap £200 tosh with win8.1 pro with downgrade rights to 7 pro, I've upgraded to 10 as well, swapped the hdd out for a SSD and added another 4gb ram. Performance wises it's pretty impressive especially as it's only a celeron. The only problem is the touch pad is pants - which seems to be a common problem with cheap laptops, luckily it's easy fixed with a sub mouse. toshiba like Lenovo have pretty good keyboards which is key (snigger) as this tends to be most people's biggest complaint other then performance. Like others have said, they be find for general IT stuff, not photoshop etc. We've got to the stage where our entry level machines are pretty impressive, the key is SSD - which is a shame hw manufacturers haven't accepted - guess it's harder to prove a £700 machine is better than a £200 to joe public if they both have SSD. The only other thing I'll say is if you by entry level, you need a more frequent refresh cycle, you can really plan to keep it for 5 years, it should be 2 - will ignore the fact you'll still be rocking them in 6years

[Cache]

Thanks guys, it's all really useful advice and info!

 

Well aware the buying cheap, buying more often etc and even 6 years would be nice, we're up to 8 on a lot of our desktops now which we've upgraded but we're deciding whether to continue with suites of desktops or move to a more flexible laptop/tablet option, hence all the questions about performance.

 

As far as I'm concerned it will just be web browsing and word processing they'll be used for, nothing much more extensive then that but then again I'm still waiting for staff to come back and tell me what they would prefer and what they want to do.

[Fazza]

6 years would be nice, we're up to 8 on a lot of our desktops now which we've upgraded

 

We've got a lot of Student Desktop computers like that - we got some cheap SSD drives for around 100 of them and it made a huge difference in performance.

[ICTDirect_Dave]

Would now be a good time to suggest this? http://www.ict-direct.co.uk/mobile-computing/laptops/dell/dell-e6420-refurbished-core-i5-laptop.html

 

Why settle for a lower specced machine with a lesser build quality when you can have a slightly older top of the line machine for less than £200?

[Oaktech]

We've got a some 'bought new' (before I arrived) Atom based tablets and AMD E2 netbooks and basically they just sit in the cupboards now I've bought 50 HP 2650 i5 machines from @ICTDirect_Dave and if anyone is unfortunate enough to have to use them all I hear is how crap they are by comparison.

 

Full fat processors all the way!

[Cache]

@ICTDirect_Dave you know your always on my list and I keep looking at your stock, I just keep checking to make sure I'm covering all options though.

 

@Fazza about 90 of our 8 year old machines have SSD's in them now, there's still about 50 I haven't had the money to sort yet though. - the SSD has been one of the best purchases though.

Edited September 11, 2015 by Cache

[ICTDirect_Dave]

@ICTDirect_Dave you know your always on my list and I keep looking at your stock, I just keep checking to make sure I'm covering all options though.

 

I know, I just get twitchy when my good customers start looking for alternatives