Overview of Laptop Processors, April 2015

Recently I've had a few people come up to me asking for advice on buying a laptop. The problem with asking for advice on a laptop is that many are looking for a good budget laptop, and the term "budget" is rather vague. I've spoken with many people over the years, and for some when they say "budget" it's almost the equivalent of saying "free"; others are a bit more sensible in that they're looking at $400 or less, while at the higher end of the definition a budget laptop could go as high as $750. And of course there are plenty of non-budget processors to consider as well.

Given the range of options at the various price points, I wanted to take some time to dig deeper into the laptop market and talk about what processors are available and what sort of performance you can expect from each. The reality as usual is that there are compromises you'll have to make, either in spending more money or giving up performance or features. But since it's important to lay the groundwork for laptop performance before getting into any specific recommendations, I wanted to post this in a separate article.

$500 Budget PC Guide

If it's been a while since your last PC upgrade, chances are good that you stand to benefit from a refresh to your hardware. While in theory anything with a Core 2 Duo / Athlon X2 (the later variants at least) or newer is still "fast enough", gains in efficiency not to mention system responsiveness are definitely worth pursuing. And if you're having any sort of stability problems on an older PC, trying to fix things can often end up costing just as much time and money as simply starting anew.

While picking out parts for a new PC is relatively simple on one level, the trick is in choosing parts that provide a good combination of price, performance, reliability/stability, and features. Despite advances in technology, the reality remains that going out and buying the cheapest motherboard often means you get exactly what you paid for: a cheap motherboard. That might mean things like compatibility issues with certain devices (e.g. DIMMs or PCIe cards), instability, and/or other issues. Troubleshooting such problems is no fun, so saving $20 at the cost of hours of lost productivity isn't something I'd recommend.

For other parts, however, the choices are pretty straightforward. CPUs/APUs rarely cause instability or other problems on their own, so the only real factor in selecting a processor is how much performance you want and how much you're willing to spend. I'll be listing several potential processor choices below. Storage and memory are for the most part compatible with any good motherboard and are largely interchangeable -- again, the decision mostly boils down to performance and capacity versus price.