Core i3 with 5730 or i5 with 5730 for gaming

[rahul7]

i jus ordered for lenovo Y560 with core i3 350m pocessor and ati radeon 5730, 4gigs ram, 500 HDD.. is this processor sufficient for playing games like battlefield2,modern wafare,crysis all on mid-high settings or should i opt for CORE i5 with same GPU?????

 

[alyoshka]

Opt for the i5. It'll be a lot more better for gaming and work.
The games you play are optimized for 4 cores..... and work very well on a quad, we have seen problems with longer loading times and a little fps when it comes to the dual cores with these game.
I'd suggest the i5 would be a better investment.
And of course if they don't bump up the price too much after that a 68XX card would be a lot more better..... with the i5....
For that matter a 58XX card would be better than the 5730.......
If it was left to me, I wouldn't exactly go for that card, I might even go for the 5770.... but not the 5730....

 

[jerreece]

He's buying a Lenovo Y560 which is a laptop. Keep that in mind when you suggest video cards alyoshka.

Laptops generally SUCK for video games. Battlefield 2 does indeed like Quad Core CPUs. But it can be played on a dual-core. Being that you're looking at a laptop, you'll be playing at lower resolutions. This is good for you, especially with a lower end graphics card like the mobile 5730. The resolution on the Lenovo Y560 appears to be set at 1366 x 768 and is not upgradable. So you should be able to get away with playing games on it at such a low screen resolution. Just keep your graphic settings down.

Lenovo offers the i5-460M which is a Dual-Core (with Hyperthreading) processor. This is definitely faster than the i3 option, but don't like Hyperthreading fool you. It's basically useless for games. So it's still a dual-core processor, just a beefier one. I'd still recommend going the i5 route if it's affordable ($50 upgrade the site shows). You get a little faster CPU, plus the i5 line supports Turbo Boost, which means the CPU sort of overclocks itself when you really need it. Though the effectiveness of such a feature while pushing both cores is probably questionable.

Here's what you can expect with the ATI 5730 GPU:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-Mobility-Radeon-HD-5730.23825.0.html

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 played @ 34FPS as an average (they don't denote actual resolution). I'd probably want to play @ Medium to keep FPS above 30, especially if you're doing multiplayer stuff.

 

[alyoshka]

Oh ok, so it's one of them laptops.....
Not the best for gaming.......

 

[rahul7]

thanks