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N3540 vs i3 4010u

S

Special-K

Weaksauce
Joined
Dec 28, 2010
Messages
119
I'm buying a laptop for my dad, he needs a 17inch and he will be only looking at youtube videos.

Those 2 CPU are killing me because on paper the n3540 looks better but I did a quick search on google and found out the 4010u was slighty better but the real question is which one to choose.

http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX55559
-500$CAD
-n3540
-4gb ram
-intel graphics ???
-500g HDD

http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX51658
-570$
-4010u
-6gb
-intel graphics 4400
-750g HDD


I know for sure he doesnt need more than 500HDD and my budget was not suppose to be more than 500+ shipping but I will choose the best for the bucks tho
 
The N3540 comes with 6 EU ("Bay Trail", similar to EU in Ivy Bridge CPUs) @ up to 896MHz. It's pretty old and quite weak.

The i3-4010u comes with 20 EU HD Graphics 4400 (higher performance Haswell graphics EUs) @ up to 1GHz. The difference isn't even close.

The i3-4010u with 2 cores/4 threads will be noticeably faster in almost everything than the old Bay Trail Atom with 4 cores. The problem with even the newest Atoms, but especially that old Bay Trail model, is that memory bandwidth is often gimped by slower memory speed and because the Atom execution architecture is quite narrow (smaller number of execution resources) to save power. Even the higher clock speed and 4 cores isn't enough to make up for that.

I'd go for the i3-4010u.

edit: the one thing I hate about the 4010U is how it is so artificially downclocked. The price level shared with the 4010U CPU has the identical core running faster with the same TDP, so there's really little reason to offer this model in the first place.
 
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Do you have a microcenter nearby? Is he set on a 17"? I just bought my little sis a 15.6" Dell Inspirion 5000 with the i3, 6 gigs of ram, 1tb hard drive, dvdrw drive,and windows 10 preloaded for $399 + tax. I use an 11.6 convertible so the 15.6 looks massive to me.
 
When I was looking at two computers with these two processors, I opted for the N3540 as it was essentially a web browsing machine and it has half of the TDP of the i3. Battery life will be better on the Baytrail CPU and it might even run fanless depending on the design.

No doubt the i3 is faster, but it's not like the N3540 is useless at its price point. It performed well for what I expected it to do.
 
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