<p>im really still leaning on the quad core…i dont want a desktop because i need a laptop to take places not just sit in my dorm room…ill actually go to best buy tomorrow and check out their 17" hp one more time and ask them if i can see well it fits in one of the laptop backpacks they sell…the current backpack i have is a laptop backpack and ive taken measurement and it seems that the 17" will fit in there…the only problem is the weight…</p>
<p>a quad-core for ~1300? anyone know why its cheaper than other quad-core laptops?</p>
<p>The Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 has a higher clock speed AND lower power consumption (25 watts).</p>
<p>The Intel Core 2 Quad Q9000 has a lower clock speed, but has a higher power consumption (45 watts).</p>
<p>I am told the power difference is equal to about 20-30 minutes of additional run time.</p>
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<p>At Newegg, it seems like the only quad core laptops are the Q9000.</p>
<p>Comparing the HP to the Toshiba at twice the price, the differences are:</p>
<p>Windows Home Premium vs. Ultimate
Screen: Same size, but slightly more pixels
Graphics card: ? don’t know enough to compare them
Hard drive: I believe the HP has a pair of 250gb 5400 rpm drives vs single 384gb 7200 rpm
Max RAM: 8gb DDR2, 4gb DDR3
Power Supply: 120-watt, 180-watt
Toshiba has bluetooth
Weight: 7.67# vs 8.99#</p>
<p>Seems like the Toshiba is built for better performance. Thus the additional cost.</p>
<p>If you compare HP to HP, the additional $400 is basically screen size and graphics card.</p>
<p>I think that the power numbers are TDP numbers which means that the computer is at load. The idle numbers are probably a lot lower but there’s still a cost for the four cores over two at low CPU usage levels. Intel made considerable improvements on power for quad cores in Nehalem. I have two Core i7 systems and they smoke - the mobile systems won’t be out until late summer or fall though. I would wait if you have the time.</p>
<p>The QC system has two drives which is nice because you can put 1 GB in the system without the bother of an external drive. Alternately, you could put an 80 GB Intel SSD for the system disk and use the second bay for a 500 GB WD conventional drive for excellent speed and storage characteristics.</p>
<p>Mobility is indeed the key reason to get a laptop over a desktop. But, what kind of mobility are we talking about here? Netbooks and ultraportables are so light that you can take them with you all day long and not feel a thing. You simply can’t say the same for a 7+ pound 17" laptop. You can take it from your room to the lounge or from your room to your friend’s room upstairs, but you do not want to be carrying it with you from class-to-class.</p>
<p>You can get a nice desktop with a quad-core Core i7, 6GB of DDR3 RAM, two 640GB hard drives, a DVD burner, a 23" monitor, and a GeForce 9-series graphics card for a little over $1,100. At the same time, you can get a netbook for portability.</p>
<p>You’d have the best of both worlds: an extremely powerful desktop and a highly-mobile netbook.</p>
<p>I think the biggest difference is the graphics card. The 9800 GTX in the Toshiba is a very high end video card, while the 4650 in the HP is more of a mid range card. Not only does the 9800 cost more, but they also have to work more with heat dissipation in the design, so that could drive up the cost. Also the 384 GB HD confuses me…I’ve never seen 384 GB as a HD size… !wait looked at another site and the Toshiba has a 64 GB SSD and a 320 GB 7200 RPM drive, so the SSD would drive up the price significantly. And the DDR3 RAM is significantly more costly than DDR2 so that would account for a bit of the difference.</p>
<p>i would advise against the quad core because many games (esp steam) and other programs do not fully support multi-core. I have a core 2 duo (2.5 GHz i think) and when playing TF2/Portal, one of the cores is at 100% use and the other one is at 5-15%. With 4 2 GHz cores, you might have trouble if a game will only use one of the cores, because 2 GHz on its own is fairly weak.</p>
<p>Sounds like you want a Core i7 quad core then. It will boost the speed of a single core above the stated frequency if the other cores aren’t in use.</p>