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. An i5-2370M, costs 80% more here. 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.

Am I correct in my assumptions? Anyone running Visual Studio on a similar laptop? Comments welcome.

Thanks.

 

[Broheim]

generally programming isn't all that demanding and the B950 will be more than fine, of course if you're working with huge projects you'll have longer compile times but I'm guessing you're doing fairly small time stuff where you really wont feel the difference (we're talking seconds here).

 

[PCTC2]

Yeah. The slowest thing would be compilation, which, even on some of my fastest machines, I still have to walk away and come back in a few hours. But you should be able to easily run Visual Studio on a B950 with 4 GB of RAM.

It took awhile, but I ran compilation jobs on a Core2Duo ULV with 2GB of RAM. If anything, just bump the RAM and get an SSD like you said, so you can run SQL server and Visual Studio and your compilation jobs without running out of memory.