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My cousin wants a sub-$300 laptop and...

G

godforbids

Junior Member
TL;DR: Skip to bottom

I've been looking around at all the advice available and coming up confused. I wanted to recommend something good but I can barely keep track of desktop part performance and all of the information about laptops is overwhelming. To provide a frame of reference for myself and others, I pulled up the laptops in my household on CPUbenchmark.net. I've also added a few words about price, general usability and reliability.

  • Late 2006 13" Macbook - Intel Core Duo T2500 @ 2.0GHz
  • OSX 10.6.8 & Windows 7 x64
[size=+1]724[/size]​

Purchased in 2006 for $1,200. The performance is rather sluggish with lots of browser tabs open but fine with general use. Apple replaced the HDD and the "T-shaped" power plug under warranty, and I upgraded the RAM from 1GB to 2GB. The battery died 2 years ago and the motherboard has been dying about as long.

  • Acer Aspire 6530 - AMD Athlon X2 QL-62 @ 2.0GHz
  • Windows 7 x32
[size=+1]962[/size]​

Impulse buy in 2009 for $300, for a course requirement. Never had any performance issues, but the screen had problems with flicker/scrambling almost immediately and (after being dropped from just 2 feet 🙄) it can no longer resume from sleep or hibernate, and often fails to shut down properly. The power cable has always had to be held at angles and the DC power port recently broke off. Parts were available for repair.

  • ASUS eeePC 1000 - Intel Atom N270 @ 1.60GHz
  • Windows XP Pro x86
[size=+1]303[/size]​

"Won" on QuiBids for maybe $100 in 2010. I had never seen on paper just why this POS is so shitty, but there it is. A CPU in this class of performance can only frustrate, and I consider this system barely usable. It makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. This is also the computer that convinced me ASUS could build bad PCs, too. It has been dropped a few times and is mostly held together with tape at the moment. It needs replacing badly.

It's just one benchmark, but I found it really telling! More detailed benchmarks are here if that's your thing. Anyway my most usable system scored about 1,000 points and I wondered what modern laptop CPUs get. The most common advice I've heard is "anything less than i3 is bad" so let's test that assumption:

  • AMD A4 [size=+1]1180-1378[/size]
  • AMD A6 [size=+1]2023-2259[/size]
  • AMD A6-4455M [size=+1]1304[/size]
  • AMD A8 3/4 [size=+1]2019-2725[/size] / [size=+1]2651-3632[/size]
  • AMD A10 [size=+1]3098-3146[/size]
  • AMD C [size=+1]243-619[/size]
  • AMD E [size=+1]299-881[/size]
  • AMD E1/2 [size=+1]722-991[/size]
  • AMD Z-01 [size=+1]485[/size]
  • Intel Atom [size=+1]194-877[/size]
  • Intel Celeron 7/8/B [size=+1]444-474[/size] / [size=+1]597-1489[/size] / [size=+1]814-1564[/size]
  • Intel Pentium P/U/B/9 [size=+1]1381-1686[/size] / [size=+1]956-1083[/size] / [size=+1]1777-1992[/size] / [size=+1]1078-1509[/size]
  • Intel Pentium 2020m/2117u [size=+1]Ivy Bridge Pentiums, I hear these will be good[/size]
  • Intel Core i3 3xx M/U [size=+1]1818-2369[/size] / [size=+1]1204-1309[/size]
  • Intel Core i3 23xx M/E [size=+1]1566-2904[/size] / [size=+1]2906[/size]
  • Intel Core i3 3xxx M/U [size=+1]2877-3657[/size] / [size=+1]2072[/size]

This list can be misleading since sometimes the maximum or minimum number are outliers and not representative or the rest of the series. Also not all processors I've seen in the marketplace are on there. But it seems to be a decent rubric to go by and kind of characterizes the system speed and other components are usually matched to that.

For comparison's sake, the desktop CPU I bought in 2009 and the one I bought yesterday:

  • AMD Phenom II X3 720 [size=+1]2539[/size]
  • Intel Core i5-3470 [size=+1]6598[/size]

Given this information, I have some questions for the community:

  1. Is i3 really the standard for usability that I've heard it is? Or just power for value?
  2. Do you think i3 laptops will be sub-300 (I mean like $250) next April?

Thanks for reading and replying!
 
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Dual-core Sandy Bridge / ivy bridge pentiums can be almost as fast as an i3 and are perfectly usable.

I have an i3-2100 desktop that I use for a media jukebox and it's also fine for general Windows use.

$250 next April? Doubtful, since all of the other parts can only drop so far, and MS wants $50+ just for Windows.
 
I would say that the cheapest Core 2 refurb laptop you can find, plus an SSD, should be better than most i3 laptops with only a 5400RPM drive, for general usage. You might be able to pick up a cheap refurb and add a 128GB SSD for something close to that price range by next April.
 
i3s will almost never go below 300 dollars when Celerons, Pentiums, and AMD's E-series abound at these lower price points for laptops. If you can get an i3 laptop for 350, that's a very good deal.

And yes, using an Atom is like time traveling back to the Pentium 4 era performance-wise.
 
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Cheapest I've seen an i3 was $350...Cheapest I've seen an Ivy i3 was $399.

Avoid the Atom; AMD C,Z and E; and slower Cels.

As you have already learned any of the processors with scores over 1000 should be serviceable.
 
Thanks for the input, everyone. I scoured the earth on Black Friday/Cyber Monday and I agree that anything under $350 was not, and will not be i3.

Buying refurbished is an interesting proposition given that brand new laptops in this price range are probably about as reliable as refurbished (not very!). Not that expensive laptops are without their problems.

Swapping the HDD for an SSD would no doubt give huge performance gains and change the game - it does even on the EEEPC - but I'm pretty sure that's beyond her technical expertise and I'm 5,000 miles away.

Probably what bothers me the most about mainstream $2xx laptops is how much performance you leave on the table by skimping $50-$100.

Granted, if $300 is your hard cap there's no going over it, but the difference between a "300" system and a "3,000" system might be just that much. I don't think there's a corollary for that difference in desktop parts.

This has been a useful thought exercise. I'm a maximizer in general so I can't bear to not get the best "bang for the buck" which is definitely i3 (though there are relatively good and bad i3s). But I think it's probably healthier, when recommending a system for someone else, that they just get what's in their price range and live with what they can get for that.

Again, probably the only thing that would make a difference here would be buying the cheapest possible thing and putting a solid state disk in it. Personally that would be the best option and I think it's worth it for an average end user to Bing/Google up some how-to guides but that's the maximizer speaking.

Computer geek or not, nobody is probably happy with EEEPC performance (300). But while geeks want i3 performance (3,000), maybe average folks are OK with Core 2, Athlon X2, etc. performance (1,000 and up). Just thinking aloud here :biggrin:
 
godforbids said:
Thanks for the input, everyone. I scoured the earth on Black Friday/Cyber Monday and I agree that anything under $350 was not, and will not be i3.

Buying refurbished is an interesting proposition given that brand new laptops in this price range are probably about as reliable as refurbished (not very!). Not that expensive laptops are without their problems.

Swapping the HDD for an SSD would no doubt give huge performance gains and change the game - it does even on the EEEPC - but I'm pretty sure that's beyond her technical expertise and I'm 5,000 miles away.

Probably what bothers me the most about mainstream $2xx laptops is how much performance you leave on the table by skimping $50-$100.

Granted, if $300 is your hard cap there's no going over it, but the difference between a "300" system and a "3,000" system might be just that much. I don't think there's a corollary for that difference in desktop parts.

This has been a useful thought exercise. I'm a maximizer in general so I can't bear to not get the best "bang for the buck" which is definitely i3 (though there are relatively good and bad i3s). But I think it's probably healthier, when recommending a system for someone else, that they just get what's in their price range and live with what they can get for that.

Again, probably the only thing that would make a difference here would be buying the cheapest possible thing and putting a solid state disk in it. Personally that would be the best option and I think it's worth it for an average end user to Bing/Google up some how-to guides but that's the maximizer speaking.

Computer geek or not, nobody is probably happy with EEEPC performance (300). But while geeks want i3 performance (3,000), maybe average folks are OK with Core 2, Athlon X2, etc. performance (1,000 and up). Just thinking aloud here :biggrin:
Click to expand...
Refurb T-series Thinkpads are likely more reliable than a little netbook since they were yesterday's business-grade laptops. If you can upgrade a T61 to a Penryn Core 2 Duo, you might get your cousin a nice one. But alas, it seems your cousin is not that technically inclined.
 
those pentium laptops that every brand sells for $350 are perfectly good. id rather have one of those than a used/refurbed i3
 
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