Should I get E4300 or E6400?

So I have a chance to pick either E series models, please help me to decide if I should get E4300 or E6400.

Currently using D630 which has T7300 2.0ghz, 2gb ram, 120gb 7.2k rpm HD, 14" 1440x900 and nvidia 135m card. I am an IT dude, I like to open multi apps or play simcity and civilization kind of games when bored at work or traveling... I bring my laptop home almost everyday (90%), so I am kinda used to the weight of D630.

Heard ddr3 ain't much faster than ddr2, but it's nice to get the new stuff... I am not sure how the CPUs compare but SP9400 looks faster with more cache and runs same speed as the ram. both weights probably the same with the 6 cell batteries. Prices are close with discount.

E4300
C2D SP9400 2.4ghz 6m cache 1066mhz
4GB DDR3 1066mhz
160GB 7.2k rpm
13" 1280x800 res
Intel 4500mdh
6 Cell battery

E6400
P8400 2.26ghz 3m cache 1066mhz
4GB DDR2 800mhz
160GB 7.2k rpm
14" 1440x900
Nvidia NVS 160M
6 Cell battery

 

Set your D630 to 1280 x 800 and see if you can live with the reduced display real estate.

How much battery time do you need? The X4500 is better in this respect. However, are you able to customise your E6400 to have the X4500 and a faster CPU?

John

 

Have a look at John Ratsey's review and this thread about the E4300.

The weights with the 6 cell batteries are ~1.8kg (E4300) and ~2.3kg (E6400). I would consider this too if I wanted to carry my laptop home every day.

 

Thx guys!

Seems like NVS 160M1 and GMA 4500MHD are my only options. I could probably upgrade to like T9400...

For battery life, D630 with 6 cell batteries last about good 4hrs, guess that's good enough and the difference is 0.5kg (1lb) between 2 models.

I read John and Cof's review both laptops, but I still can't decide. This is driving me nuts...

 

If I were happy with 1280 x 800 then I would probably get the smaller notebook. On the other hand, the cooling system of the E6400 may be a bit bigger and less noisy (I have no complaints in this respect).

Make a table of the features of both models and give weighting for your preferences.

John

 

I'm in pretty much the same boat.

The 6400 is a bit more powerful, but I think the 4300 will be plenty powerful enough for my purposes (and significantly better than the D410 I'm using now).

The bigger screen on the 6400 doesn't matter to me because I rarely use the notebook screen.

The discrete video card is not a big deal for the business apps that I use (and without switchable graphics may even reduce battery time).

When I table all the features, I end up with the most significant difference being weight and size. Since I carry my notebook with me every single place I go every single day, weight and size do matter for me.

Accordingly, I'm going with the 4300.

I'm just waiting for Dell to work out some of the bugs before I splurge. I suspect that some of the issues we have been hearing about (DVD burners, trackpoint behaviour, power profiles, assembly anomalies) will be worked out once (a) Dell engineers have a chance to work on these issues, and (b) the assemblers get used to putting these things together properly and spotting bad parts.

 

I don't know about the processors, though I figured that the SP series was low voltage, it doesn't seem that way.

It seems that the DVD burners have fixed themselves somehow, trackpoint has been fixed with a BIOS update (though supposedly still not as good as a Thinkpad touchpoint), the problems with assembly have all but disappeared in the past few weeks. People had been posting quite often before about problems, now, not so often. There are still the odd issue with the notebook not restoring from sleep properly (display) and the throttling (though I haven't experienced that). That seems to be the only real problem.

Greg

 

Arh, double checked and the graphic card options as below:
E6400 - Intel X4500HD or NVS 160M
E4300 - Intel 4500MHD
*I guess the Intel are the same just named differently.


Just too much choices in life, sigh~

For CPU power, SP9400 with DDR3 seems faster than P8400 with DDR2... I probably won't notice the difference in real life, the numbers look that way.

Really don't care about their issues since the package includes 3yrs complete covers...

 

The X4500HD is a desktop part and the 4500MHD is a mobile part. Where it gets confusing is that there are actually 4 versions of the 4500MHD, and the bottom version (GL40) does not have the same feature set as the rest.

The E4300 uses the GS45 chipset so it would be functionally-equivalent to the higher-end GM45 and GM47, as well as the desktop X4500 and X4500HD (though not the plain 4500). The only difference between all of those should be clock speed, memory interface speed (DDR2 or DDR3), and power consumption.

If Dell really has used the X4500HD and not the 4500MHD in the E6400 then that might explain some of the heat issues people have reported, particularly when docked. Dell says that the notebook is packing an "Intel 45 Express Chipset" and doesn't give any more detail, so it might be a desktop part and not a mobile one. Someone should run CPU-Z and find out which chipset is in there.

EDIT: Depending on where you look, Dell claims that the system either has 4500MHD or X4500HD graphics. I'd assume the mobile since it would be real unlikely that it's packing a desktop chipset, those are usually reserved for 17" notebooks, but that still doesn't tell you whether it's the GL40, GS45, GM45, or GM47.

 

CPU-Z says GM45/ GM47 in my E6400 with Intel graphics. Sisoftware Sandra says GM45. I'm 100% sure it is not a desktop part but maybe whoever wrote the spec wasn't sure which part it is.

John