X7900 worth $477 over T7800?

NickHope wrote on 3/10/2008, 6:46 AM
Apologies for not adding this to my old Dell vs Lenovo laptop thread but search isn't working at all for me now so I can't find it.

Still didn't get my laptop but have 2 quotations in front of me for a Dell Precision M6300 with 4Gb RAM, XP Pro, 17" WUXGA display, 200Gb hard drive etc..

75,900 Thai Baht for T7800 (2.8GHz) CPU ($2,406)
91,000 Thai Baht for X7900 (2.6GHz) CPU ($2,880)

Is the X7900 worth the extra $477? I want to edit natively and smoothly in m2t HDV and will be rendering and burning DVDs in rather a hurry at the end of diving trips. But it seems a lot extra and I heard the X7900 runs hot. I'm tending towards the T7800 and saving the money.

Wanted a 17" WUXGA laptop with 2 x internal hard drives ideally as external hard drives are my enemy but couldn't get one configured with XP, a non-glossy display, and a decent long international warranty. I might break with convention and try capturing to and editing on the single internal 7200RPM drive.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 3/10/2008, 7:57 AM
Don't know anything about those Dell models other than that i won't touch Dell with a 3.048 metre pole.

My laptop came with a glossy screen, glossy as in like a sheet of window glass. It startled me at first, but now i've come to love it. I don't ever want a matte screen now. The thing is, there's going to be a bad glare with a glossy screen, but it doesn't take much effort to find a direction to turn it in which the glare isn't visible to you. With a matte screen there's always a muted glare over the whole screen no matter which way you turn it. It's gotten so that i don't even want to look at a matte screen because the image is so bad on them.

I capture to my single internal 5400RPM drive with no issues whatsoever. No dropped frames ever.
NickHope wrote on 3/10/2008, 8:19 AM
Well yeah, I've come to the conclusion that choosing a laptop manufacturer is a bit of a lottery from the reliability and service point of view. Dell have been very good to me to this point.

When I'm using my laptop, this is my studio so reflections are a problem!



This page really put me off the glossy version.

Anyone any views on the CPU?
farss wrote on 3/10/2008, 8:40 AM
A Hoodman for the screen micght be a good idea. They fold up into almost nothing.
Re the CPU, can't offer much more than you could find from a Google of reviews. The X7900 seems to be offered in a range of top end laptops. Is it worth the money I don't know. Cache seems to be the same size and clock speed is only slightly higher. It does seem to be more capable for OCing, probably the last thing you'd want to do in a laptop.

You always pay top dollar for the 'fastest'!

Bob.
MH_Stevens wrote on 3/10/2008, 9:46 AM
Generally, when you get to this level of processor it is the RAM that is the weak link in the chain. I would say very fast processors are only of great value if you run 64bit Vista and have 8+ MB of very fast RAM, and you wont get this from Dell. Talk to the people at Sagar. Bob recommended them to me and after returning 3 laptops I'm happy.
gpsmikey wrote on 3/10/2008, 10:25 AM
I suspect that it would work much better with 8+ GB of RAM :-)

mikey