I3 2310M vs 380M vs P6200

[marten]

Hu guys,

I'm looking to buy a notebook soon, and I'm aiming for one of this cpu's: i3 2310M, i3 380M or P6200.
I know there is no much difference between 380M and P6200, but what do you think of i3 2310M? In theory it should be better, it's newer technology, but we all know that does not always apply.

Any opinion would be great.

Thanks,
Marten

 

[jaguarskx]

The i3 2310m and i3 380m are more or less the same; the i3 380m will be marginally faster.

The biggest difference is the graphics core. The i3 380m will be paired with an Intel GMA 4500 graphic core in budget laptops. More expensive laptops can have dedicated graphics cards like the nVidia GT 560. The i3 2310m includes a graphics core inside the CPU called the Intel HD 3000. It give 2x more performance than the GMA 4500 in games. In fact it is marginally faster than the desktop Radeon HD 5450. Of course more expensive laptops with the i3 2310m can also have a dedicated graphics card as well.

Not that it make much of a difference for most people, but the i3 380m can only recognize 8GB of RAM while the i3 2310m can recognize up to 16GB. Since most laptops only have two memory slot and 8GB sticks of RAM are really expensive, most people will not install that much RAM in a laptop.

 

[marten]

Thanks for your reply. So I should leave P6200 out of this and go for i3. The laptop won't be used for games at all, so the graphics core is not that important to me. It just needs to play 1080p fine.

 

[jaguarskx]

Yeah, I would go with the i3-2310m for video playback. Since the integrated graphics core is more powerful than the GMA 4500, you should not have any issues playback issues.