HP Pavilion: DV6-3040 vs dv7-4030 vs dv7-4120

Mezriss

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Nov 23, 2010
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Hello, I'm choosing laptop for work (java-based ide, firefox with 20+ tabs and occasionally photoshop) and gaming and can't decide which model should I get.

DV6-3040 seems to be nice, but it's has only 15.6"

DV7-4030 is big enough, but I'm not sure about i5-450m. It gets 11% less points than i7-720qm on 3dmark and has only 2 cores, but will it be noticeable in most current games? I've also heard that it's impossible to install latest catalyst drivers because of the second GPU (i5 seems to have one). No sure if that is true.

DV7-4120 has a slightly better i5-460m, but its 4gb memory comes as single block, so no dual channel memory, unless I'll get another 4gb which I'm not really willing to do.

Any advice?


 

raza715

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Oct 5, 2008
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The middle one is better. And the 10% diff of 3dmark06 will apear as 5 to 10 fps diff in games which is not much(10 or more fps difference in quad core optimized games like resident evil 5, far cry 2, battle field bad company 2, dragon age origins and very few) and can easily be achieved by overclocking your 5650 a bit to safer levels, easily 5+ fps will increase. So get the middle one with i5. But if you can afford more then your should go with i7 720qm or i5 560m.

For photoshop and browsing i7 will be a killer as these applications are quad optimized