- Oct 30, 2011
- 28
- 0
- 18,530
Hello all,
As many of you may know, Intel has recently been putting in a lot of work to their Atom SOC's in an attempt to combat ARM's dominance in the mobile world. As a result, they recently released their new Bay Trail line of Atom processors and results have been quite impressive. In the wake of this launch, we have seen quite a few new low power, x86 tablets running a full Windows 8 (not the red-headed stepchild we all know as Windows RT). Being able to have an affordable, lightweight tablet with long battery life that is also able to be used for work and productivity on-the-go has been quite an attractive prospect to many people, myself included. So I went looking at what the different manufacturers had to offer.
After doing some looking around at a few reviews and videos I concluded that the Asus Transformer Book T100TA would be my best bet. Great performance, long battery life, expandable storage, and includes a keyboard dock, all for only $379 for the 64GB version (i'm a broke ass college student so every penny I can save is great). There were some downsides to it compared to other high end tablets like the lower end 1366x768 screen, less premium feel, but all in all it seemed pretty great. To top it all off, one of the biggest advancements that Bay Trail had over Clover Trail was the massive increase in graphics performance of over four times. The improvement was so dramatic that many games that had previously run well into the single digits on fps were now at playable framerates. This is a huge difference and makes this little machine a viable gaming machine for loads of indie games and other more demanding games at low settings (see link below, you might be surprised what this thing can do). So, I was all set and felt comfortable/excited to buy this.... until I heard about Cherry Trail. Cherry Trail being Intel's next iteration of their Atom line which is slated for release in late Q2/ early Q3 2014. The important thing that caught my eye on the list of advantages projected about Clover Trail was its further increased graphics performance. The problem is I have heard all sorts of conflicting claims about how dramatic this performance increase actually is. This is important because as you can probably see from the link I provided the Bay Trail chip is able to offer performance in a lot of games that is ALMOST playable. And I mean so close you can almost taste it (20-25fps in a lot of games). So, this leads me on to my main question:
Do I buy Bay Trail now or do I wait for Cherry Trail?
This is difficult because I would definitely like to get my hands on this thing as soon as possible, but I am willing to wait if the difference is that dramatic. I am completely aware that you can spend your whole life saying, "Well i'll just wait till X releases then i'll buy it" and not actually buy anything, but this is kind of a special exception because Intel is playing very aggressive catchup in an attempt to gain market-share in the mobile field. It would really be eating me for eternity if I ended up going with the Bay Trail and six months later Cherry Trail comes out with double the performance and half of my game library is unplayable on the go. You should all also bear in mind that considering my financial situation and (relatively) competent ability to to resist splurging and reflex purchases, I am going to be stuck with this machine for at least a couple years. This is all also obviously under the assumption that ASUS will be releasing a Cherry Trail option in the same price bracket when it launches, which it probably will... hopefully... okay feel free to chime in any time here, JJ.
Also I should mention that some of the things that ARE known about Cherry Trail is that it will be based on the 14nm manufacturing process (possble delays then?) and that it will be using a Broadwell-class GPU.
Thanks for all the help guys and I hope some of you who are better informed than myself can help me to make the right decision.
Cheers!
-Julian
tl;dr Bay Trail now or wait for Cherry Trail for gaming?
Example of Bay Trail gaming performance (this guy has loads on his channel): https://www.youtube.com/user/th3drow/videos
The laptop I was looking at:http://www.amazon.com/Transformer-T100TA-C1-GR-10-1-Inch-Convertible-Tou...
As many of you may know, Intel has recently been putting in a lot of work to their Atom SOC's in an attempt to combat ARM's dominance in the mobile world. As a result, they recently released their new Bay Trail line of Atom processors and results have been quite impressive. In the wake of this launch, we have seen quite a few new low power, x86 tablets running a full Windows 8 (not the red-headed stepchild we all know as Windows RT). Being able to have an affordable, lightweight tablet with long battery life that is also able to be used for work and productivity on-the-go has been quite an attractive prospect to many people, myself included. So I went looking at what the different manufacturers had to offer.
After doing some looking around at a few reviews and videos I concluded that the Asus Transformer Book T100TA would be my best bet. Great performance, long battery life, expandable storage, and includes a keyboard dock, all for only $379 for the 64GB version (i'm a broke ass college student so every penny I can save is great). There were some downsides to it compared to other high end tablets like the lower end 1366x768 screen, less premium feel, but all in all it seemed pretty great. To top it all off, one of the biggest advancements that Bay Trail had over Clover Trail was the massive increase in graphics performance of over four times. The improvement was so dramatic that many games that had previously run well into the single digits on fps were now at playable framerates. This is a huge difference and makes this little machine a viable gaming machine for loads of indie games and other more demanding games at low settings (see link below, you might be surprised what this thing can do). So, I was all set and felt comfortable/excited to buy this.... until I heard about Cherry Trail. Cherry Trail being Intel's next iteration of their Atom line which is slated for release in late Q2/ early Q3 2014. The important thing that caught my eye on the list of advantages projected about Clover Trail was its further increased graphics performance. The problem is I have heard all sorts of conflicting claims about how dramatic this performance increase actually is. This is important because as you can probably see from the link I provided the Bay Trail chip is able to offer performance in a lot of games that is ALMOST playable. And I mean so close you can almost taste it (20-25fps in a lot of games). So, this leads me on to my main question:
Do I buy Bay Trail now or do I wait for Cherry Trail?
This is difficult because I would definitely like to get my hands on this thing as soon as possible, but I am willing to wait if the difference is that dramatic. I am completely aware that you can spend your whole life saying, "Well i'll just wait till X releases then i'll buy it" and not actually buy anything, but this is kind of a special exception because Intel is playing very aggressive catchup in an attempt to gain market-share in the mobile field. It would really be eating me for eternity if I ended up going with the Bay Trail and six months later Cherry Trail comes out with double the performance and half of my game library is unplayable on the go. You should all also bear in mind that considering my financial situation and (relatively) competent ability to to resist splurging and reflex purchases, I am going to be stuck with this machine for at least a couple years. This is all also obviously under the assumption that ASUS will be releasing a Cherry Trail option in the same price bracket when it launches, which it probably will... hopefully... okay feel free to chime in any time here, JJ.
Also I should mention that some of the things that ARE known about Cherry Trail is that it will be based on the 14nm manufacturing process (possble delays then?) and that it will be using a Broadwell-class GPU.
Thanks for all the help guys and I hope some of you who are better informed than myself can help me to make the right decision.
Cheers!
-Julian
tl;dr Bay Trail now or wait for Cherry Trail for gaming?
Example of Bay Trail gaming performance (this guy has loads on his channel): https://www.youtube.com/user/th3drow/videos
The laptop I was looking at:http://www.amazon.com/Transformer-T100TA-C1-GR-10-1-Inch-Convertible-Tou...
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