I5-3317U vs i5-3210M- Which would you buy?

jshoe

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Oct 9, 2009
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Hey,

I just bought this laptop here for $600. I thought I got a pretty good deal.

http://www.staples.com/Lenovo-Thinkpad-Edge-E430-3254-AH2-14-Laptop/product_932004?catalogId=10051&fromUrl=home&cmSearchKeyword=thinkpad+e430&cmArea=SEARCH&langId=-1&storeId=10001&ddkey=http:StaplesSearch

I just saw that Dell was offering the 14z with a 32GB solid state drive and a 500GB traditional HD through the Member Purchase Program with 5% back as a Dell gift card.

What bothers me about the Lenovo is that it has no HD LED and since it's a business oriented laptop has many of the SMB technologies from Intel.

The Lenovo has the Intel Core i5-3210M. The Dell has the Intel® Core™ i5-3317U. Which CPU is actually "better" and why?

I'm not sure if I should return the Lenovo for the Inspiron 14z.... What would you do?

(I'm sure If I looked hard enough I could find a small program to sit in the sys tray for HD activity if I looked hard enough.)


Thanks!
 

yawnny

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Jan 20, 2012
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Well by the looks of it the 3210M is clocked a whole lot higher than the 3317U..

They're both Ivy Bridge so you'll actually have not too shabby graphics performance on both with Intel's HD Graphics 4000. Besides the clock speed there isn't too much difference between both these i5's.

On a side note, Lenovo products really only mean business with their T series and up.. the Edge line isn't meant to be as durable or business focused as their higher tier models. Although I would say stick with the Thinkpad because of the faster CPU and just upgrade to a 250GB SSD later down the road. :)
 
It all comes down to battery life. The Intel® Core™ i5-3317U is a 17w CPU while the Intel Core i5-3210M is a 35w processor. So you will generally get a little better performance from the Intel Core i5-3210M but shorter batter life. So if you are a student I would stay with which ever one has the Intel Core i5-3317u for the battery life. If you are looking to game on this then you would want to move to the Intel Core i5-3210M. http://ark.intel.com/compare/65708,65707
 

jshoe

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I got the Lenovo but it seemed to lag quite a bit. I'm going to try the Dell. I would have kept the Lenovo but I couldn't disable the business technologies built into the chip. Those seemed to slow it down. I did disable some of the features which improved performance but for some reason the Lenovo didn't allow me to turn off the rest.
 

fuseless

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Do a clean windows installation, you will notice a big performance difference.

The preinstalled software makes everything slower.

Regards.