Intel B950 good enough for programming

[mausch]

I'm considering getting a Lenovo G470 with an Intel B950 / 4GB RAM. Question is whether this CPU is enough to decently run Visual Studio 2010/2012 (mostly C# programming) + SQL Server. I see in the benchmarks that this CPU is quite close to the basic 2nd-gen i3, but the price difference is ridiculous in my country, the B950 being a lot cheaper than any i3 or i5. I'd rather put the money in a nice SSD, which should make a bigger difference than the small CPU differences. Especially since the laptop comes with a 5400RPM HDD. I'll probably also upgrade to 8GB RAM in the future.

My desktop is an i5-2500 / 8GB RAM / Corsair Force 3 and VS2010/2012/SQL Server runs great, so I'm looking for something as close to that as possible.
I chose Lenovo because of the keyboard, I really appreciate a good keyboard (my desktop has a Leopold/Cherry blues) and I can't stand the usual chiclet keyboards in most laptops.

Am I correct in my assumptions? Comments welcome.

Thanks.

 

[aicom]

The one major performance thing you lose with a Pentium series CPU is the turbo boost feature. Normally this isn't a huge deal, but on the mobile side it's a bit more of a factor considering that most mobile CPUs can turbo up to 1 GHz, which puts them much closer to their desktop counterparts.

If you're looking to use any virtual machines for testing, you'll also be taking a severe performance hit there because the CPU doesn't have hardware virtualization support.

With the i3, you'd get hyper-threading and hardware virtualization support, so I'd probably recommend that at the least if you can afford it. If not, I don't think a B950 is going to be awful, but it's definitely a budget mobile part and it's going to perform like one.

 

[maui67]

If you are going to have Visual Studio, SQL server, and SQL Server Management Studio running at the same time i think you will be happier with an i5 in that laptop. You are also going to want 8GB of RAM in the laptop as well. Things will run much smoother. Just my opinion.

I use Visual Studio and SQL Server Management Studio all day at work on a laptop (desktop replacement) running an i7 and 8gb of RAM, so I am speaking from experience. But I also realize you have a budget, so just get the best that you can.

 

[mausch]

Thanks for the comments.

Here's the thing: a laptop similar to the one I was looking at, only with a i5-2370M instead of the B950, costs 80% more here. For context, this amounts to ~80% of my monthly income. Such is the suckiness of living in a third-world country, but it is what it is. The price difference with an i3-2330M (which doesn't even have TurboBoost) is around 45% more. I don't think the performance difference justifies this.

Thus my idea of getting the B950 and adding more memory and SSD, which ends up costing the same as the basic i3-2330M laptop but should perform much better overall.
I'm not planning to run any virtual machines on this laptop.

I'd love it if someone with an actual B950 could try Visual Studio on a moderately-sized project and see if it's usable.

Cheers

 

[warvibe]

Thanks for the comments.

Here's the thing: a laptop similar to the one I was looking at, only with a i5-2370M instead of the B950, costs 80% more here. For context, this amounts to ~80% of my monthly income. Such is the suckiness of living in a third-world country, but it is what it is. The price difference with an i3-2330M (which doesn't even have TurboBoost) is around 45% more. I don't think the performance difference justifies this.

Thus my idea of getting the B950 and adding more memory and SSD, which ends up costing the same as the basic i3-2330M laptop but should perform much better overall.
I'm not planning to run any virtual machines on this laptop.

I'd love it if someone with an actual B950 could try Visual Studio on a moderately-sized project and see if it's usable.

Cheers

I'm currently using a Pentium B950 processor Laptop(Sony Vaio). I wasn't too fond of it at first since I previously had a HP pavilion laptop which had a AMD Dual Core Turion ii X2 @2.30 Ghz and had a Radeon HD Graphics Chip from the 4000+ series(max resolution 1280x800), which I thought was a monster because it performed very well lol, but it had stopped working because of some issue, and later on, I bought this sony laptop with the sandy bridge based intel(the Pentium Dual Core B950 @2.10GHz, with Intel HD Graphics 1366x768) which seemed pretty basic compared to what the HP that I owned had. but it turned out to be actually more powerful and I am glad I bought it because it hasn't acted bizarre or malfunctioned in any way, even till this day(I had it for quite some time).

I'm going to tell you, don't be fooled by all the other performance boosters that it doesn't have like what you would find in the i3's and so on. The Pentium B950 is actual very impressive and rather powerful for something of it's low-end status and is just the thing i'd recommend for your programming operations. I currently use it to run programs like Sony Vegas pro and Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects, plus play some games like Super Street Fighter 4, Bastion, etc and it performs splendidly and with your idea to upgrade it's memory and install a SSD, I think it'd be more than enough to suite your needs for this purpose. Obviously these are much better computers out there but that's not the issue, you wanted to know if the B950 is good enough for the purposes that you specified and my answer to that is, ABSOLUTELY!.

 

[mausch]

I got the B950 with 8GB RAM and a Corsair Force 3 SSD a few days ago, and I'm quite satisfied with its performance so far. Granted, it's not as powerful as my desktop computer, but I never intended for this laptop to be a desktop replacement. For most small to medium projects, Visual Studio remains very responsive, even with ReSharper installed, and compiles with more than acceptable speed.
TL;DR it's a good processor for general programming.

 

[mausch]

Best answer selected by mausch.