How will the i5 4200u 1.6 Ghz paired with an AMD 8850M perform?

dhruv990

Distinguished
Mar 12, 2010
52
0
18,590
Now I saw on notebookcheck that the AMD 8850M in terms of power is similar to the Nvidia 660m. So given that I'm happy with card i'm pretty sure the AMD will satisfy a friend of mine whos looking at a new laptop.

I found this laptop with good specs otherwise (The aforementioned AMD GPU, 6 GB of RAM, 1 TB HDD) however the 1.6 GHz i5 processor kinda turned me off. Particularly because today is the time of >2 Ghz processors. But the new manufacturing process and haswell architecture may pull out some more power from this lower clocked processor but I dont know for sure.

So I just wanted to know, from any of you that has an experience with the processor or knows more about it than me, is it worth purchasing a laptop built with this CPU, because the Graphics are fine and at the price steam like a steal, but the CPU you know.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks :)
 
Solution

Kraszmyl

Distinguished
Apr 7, 2011
21
0
18,590
Solution

dhruv990

Distinguished
Mar 12, 2010
52
0
18,590

Great that helps thanks, also there a couple of games coming out, particularly watch dogs, which require a minimum of q8400 processor. Will the dual core i5 be able to run it (it performs better than the q8400 according to benchmarks)
 

Kraszmyl

Distinguished
Apr 7, 2011
21
0
18,590
Clock for clock the haswell cpu is going to be considerably better than the q8400 and in gaming atleast hyper threading should take up the slack of having two less real cores. So realistically it should do okay unless they do something with the game threads that hyper threading hates. I'd be more concerned about the laptops thermal management allowing it to maintain a decent turboboost.

Good example are two old asus laptops I had. One was a c2d 2.4ghz dual core. One was a 1.6ghz i7 quad that turboed to 2.8. It spent most of its gaming life around 2.4 to 2.6 and was easily better than the c2d and that's just an original core I series without the pretty things haswell does. So again comes back to cooling and how well hyper threading can replace the two real cores which historically so far in gaming it has been able to come close.

Also those aren't the final specs of the game according to ubisoft. They claim they are higher than what is going to be actually needed.

http://www.videogamer.com/pc/watch_dogs/news/leaked_watch_dogs_pc_specs_are_not_official_says_ubisoft.html
 

dhruv990

Distinguished
Mar 12, 2010
52
0
18,590


Ahh cool, and its a dell, in my experience they've been pretty good in managing heat, as long as they're not kept on the bed. Anyways I've told my friend to get a cooling pad so as to resolve any heating issues. So given what you told me I'll tell him to get it if his budget is tight right now. He was wanting to get the lenovo y500, but he doesnt see any cash inflow in the next couple of months and he needed a laptop now.
 

Kraszmyl

Distinguished
Apr 7, 2011
21
0
18,590
You might want to take a look at delloutlet.com. They are returned units mostly and sometimes there are some pretty nice deals. Picked up a m14x r2 last January for 900ish with most of the goodies they come with. They all come with a normal warranty as well.

Also as some one who used to work for dell, if you friend can spend the extra like 70$ for the north American support, get it. The non north American support works fine, they just have to go through more hoops to get stuff done than the American support. direct example is alienware basic support takes about 30 minutes to do what I could have done in 7 due to the fact they have to get approvals for everything.

Its also worth looking at the haswell latitudes with dgpus. They come with better warranty support base line too.
 

dhruv990

Distinguished
Mar 12, 2010
52
0
18,590


Problem is that we live in India, so I have no clue whether those are available in my country.
 

ashish12

Honorable
Jul 12, 2013
11
0
10,560
Hi dhruv i'm from india too,, coincidentally i have the same question i have been wanting to get Y500 but because of my budget couldn't now i have ordered dell inspiron 15r and will get it in a couple of days or so but i was wondering if i5 4200u will be a bottleneck for 8850m while playing heavy games like watch dogs,battlefield 4 agta 5(when released),the division on full screen with medium settings what do you think. what would you have done if you had the money to buy a Y500 or dell inspiron 15r. i'm not even sure if sli ultrabay will ever come to india!
 

dhruv990

Distinguished
Mar 12, 2010
52
0
18,590


Hey I'm kinda hoping the same, I'm getting the y510p next year. Deciding on whether or not to recommend this one to my friend. However if the i5 does not create a bottleneck the games should play fine given that the 8850m performs slightly above the GTX 660m. BTW In case you got it from flipkart could you tell me if it;s the correct model? And tell me how it performs? And yeah god knows when they'll release ultrabay graphics here, but thats why we have good pals in the US :)