Pentium vs i3 for Home Computing

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Dan1000

Dan1000

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Potentially rebuilding my Dad's girlfriends computer as its a relic and using the outdated Windows XP.

Used primarily for email, surfing the web, documents.

No gaming.

Thought off using http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-531-IN&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=567 or http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-531-IN&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=567.

Mobo would be most likely http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-241-MS&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=2576.

Any thoughts?
 
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It's doubtful they would even be able to notice the difference.

An SSD, SSD Cache, or Hybrid Drive would probably be far more noticeable for day to day tasks since in general use the processor mostly sits around idle. Yet when you click to open your browser and e-mail and they are on the screen faster than you can move your hand to your keyboard to type the URL or E-mail it makes your machine feel great and responsive.
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Traciatim

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It's doubtful they would even be able to notice the difference.

An SSD, SSD Cache, or Hybrid Drive would probably be far more noticeable for day to day tasks since in general use the processor mostly sits around idle. Yet when you click to open your browser and e-mail and they are on the screen faster than you can move your hand to your keyboard to type the URL or E-mail it makes your machine feel great and responsive.
 
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logainofhades

logainofhades

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2Be_or_Not2Be

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Yes, maybe in general use, the SSD would be the best upgrade. The Pentium does have a bit of grunt, although not nearly as much as the i3.

However, I want to give an anecdotal (take it for what you paid for it) experience that I just suffered through yesterday. I was working on a HP 2000 Notebook (AMD E1-1200 APU). I was loading the Windows 8.1 update on it, and it literally took close to two hours for it to download (a 75Mbps Internet connection, so it wasn't the Internet speed) & then apply the update. I can't tell you how many times the "Almost there" and the other nice text things along with the color gradient fills cycled through. Then I had to download and apply another 100MB of updates - there went another hour of my life.

So while it might be fine for small things like reading email and maybe light web browsing, it was a dead dog when it came to installing programs. It is a travesty that HP even sold that extremely under-powered Zacate platform, and I'll never get the hours back that were spent just waiting for it to load. I considered advising the owner to buy a SSD for it, but then I realized it still had the same underpowered CPU (APU platform - I'm sure the Kabini platform is much better). So I recommended replacing the whole notebook itself.

So, for me, I'd take the i3 myself first, and then consider a SSD later. The Haswell Pentium isn't bad though, so it won't be near the terrible experience I had. You could even go with the i3 and a small SSD if the end-user won't be storing tons of pictures/videos, like the Crucial MX100 - 128GB for $75 from Newegg.
 
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Traciatim

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It's funny that you tell a story that sounds like it has way more to do with crappy IO performance from it's storage and then decide that it's not with it to upgrade the storage system on the new machine first. It probably didn't haev enough RAM to act as a cache either since it needs it all for whatever it was doing at the time.

That machine probably had an incredibly slow 5400RPM notebook drive and short of a few times where it was actually doing work the processor was probably sitting around waiting on the drive to finish up what it was doing. I would be willing to bet that machine would even feel fairly snappy for an e-mail getter if you instead swapped that drive out for a little 60-120GB SSD (and ensure it has 4GB of RAM at least).
 
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2Be_or_Not2Be

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Heh heh... well, this isn't my first rodeo! It does have 4GB of RAM, and in general use, the notebook seems okay with its 320GB HD. It's when you have to load/install a program that it tends to creep. Again, this is the old Zacate platform with probably its worst representative of that whole line; a newer Kabini surely wouldn't have this problem. Sure, a SSD would help it, but it doesn't make fiscal sense when Dell will sell you a new Inspiron 15 w/4GB for $250.
 
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Traciatim

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But again, you blame the processor when you say it seems fine during normal use yet slows to a crawl when loading or installing, a task that is almost exclusively determined by the storage system and that the processor has almost zero impact on. How are you going from "Accessing and writing to storage is slow" to "Processor must be at fault".


 
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Dan1000

Dan1000

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Cheers, I'll go with the Pentium and get a small SSD for the OS and Word and stuff, they've got a 250GB old Hard Drive I'll use for My Pictures etc
 
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2Be_or_Not2Be

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Well, to your question, the end-user has remarked that the system has been slow in regular use as well. I remarked upon its general use as the time that I personally had to spend with it. Win 8 is probably helping in that part by being faster for start-up & eventually giving me a desktop. Sure, I can also put some blame on the 320GB WD drive as well. But installing is NOT always a storage-only task; a number of things are affected by the processor's power (or lack thereof).

However, back to the overall point - if you're thinking upgrade, which would you recommend - a SSD for that laptop or a new laptop entirely? When I can get a $250 laptop from Dell and a decent ~128GB SSD is from $75-110 (Crucial MX100 or Samsung EVO), I'm not recommending a SSD. I would start out with the stronger "brain" first and then complement it later with a SSD.
 
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