laptop processors

[david12345]

hi buying laptops for school every few years, the processors have changed and it is hard to figure out what's a good deal. eg celeron may be inferior but the latest one may be faster than a two year old laptop with a processor that was better than celeron in its time and hence fine for a teacher's general use?

eg Intel Core2 Duo T5450 @ 1.66GHz from a couple of years ago gets a passmark of 942 on PassMark - CPU Benchmarks - List of Benchmarked CPUs and Celeron Dual-Core T3100 @ 1.90GHz gets a mark of 1310 ie better... would you trust this website or are there other ref sources for people who can't keep all the processor types and models in their head?

alternatively what are good value processors for a teacher's general use laptop at the moment?

[Kitkatninja]

Personally, I buy in laptops with at least a dual core 1.9GHz or above (regardless of whether or not it's an AMD, C2D, Celeron Dual Core) - processor wise. To be honest unless it was for a "specialist" subject (eg media for video editing, D&T for CAD/CAM), the Dual Core 1.9Ghz (and above) chips will happily run any education software package including Office, DVD play back software, etc... Plus it's not just down to the CPU... HDD access/seek times, amount & type of ram, and whether it had integrated or a dedicated graphics card also dictates the overall performance of the laptop. Added to that if any laptop was still in good running order after 3 years it'd be a bonus, so a good waranty package for the laptop is one to look out for

 

-Ken