3210m vs 3320m

I am about to order the t430 and I cant decide between those two processors is the 50 dollar upgrade worth it? with the discount and tax it would really be a 45 dollar upgrade. I looked at some benchmarks and on
PassMark Intel vs AMD CPU Benchmarks - High End
they have the 3210m at 3853 and the 3320m at 4481. Is the differece really that great?

 

I would say it's not worth the $45 to upgrade. The only differences are a minor bump in clock speed and support for some virtualization features that you won't need if you don't already know about them.

 

Unless you are into VT-D

 

Currently there is some stock shortage that is occurring on the Intel i5-3320m. So when you order you should be aware of any delay (if any), right now it is pushing back the Lead Time of Australian orders by more than 28 days.

 

Use that $50 toward a faster hard drive (7200RPM) or toward an SSD upgrade down the road, that'll net you far more performance benefits than the slight processor bump.

 

It's a tough call, but I'd go with i5-3320m.
You get about 5% faster base cpu (more on turbo) and the graphics core speed is 1.2 ghz compared to 1.1 ghz. Doesn't mean much, but it isn't nothing either. It's only $45, and I'll be using one laptop for at least 3 years, so I think it is worthy.

Compare Intel® Products

You can upgrade hdd/ssd or ram later on, but you can't upgrade the cpu. People do all kind of things to get couple more % of performance.

 

If someone replaced my 3210m with a 3320m without telling me, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Even with the CPU pegged at 100% the difference is going to be minimal.

 

The differences will rarely ever show themselves unless there is a side-by-side benchmark of each one, or another side-by-side comparison. The best example I can think of would be encoding a movie or some crazy CAD software that probably shouldn't be ran on a T series anyway.

The differences lie in their respective usability rather than straight (overall) system performance. If you need virtualization, the 3320m is nearly a necessity. Otherwise, if you can really justify $50 for the upgrade, what exactly are you doing with a T series in the first place that requires 100mhz more in clock speed anyway?


Now, that being said, I opted for the 3320m anyway. Had I known I would be able to upgrade that to the 3612Qm proc off ebay, i probably would have stuck with the cheapest processor available at the time.

 

Same could be said for using 1333 ram instead of 1600 speed ram on ivy bridge. Or using a lower latency ram. Of course it is hard to notice the difference, but I would want a 1600 speed ram for sure if the price difference isnt too big. Yeah, so I think it is a little tricky choice to make.

Also all laptops I worked with had soldered cpu so I never considered upgrading a cpu aftermarket.