Intel Core i5: Multitasking Awesomeness June 21, 2010
Posted by Chaim Gartenberg in : Computers, First Look/Reviews, Teen Info, Web , trackback
Intel Core i5. Whoooosh!
OK, let me say this from the beginning – if you are buying a new laptop for school, for anything – get a Core i5.
I’ve had the opportunity to be able to try out a laptop with the new chips, and to sum it up – it’s fast. Really, really fast. Think of things that you do often on your computer – web browsing, gaming, note taking in word, watching videos on Youtube, listening to music on iTunes, chatting with friends in AIM, updating things on Twitter, watching shows on Hulu.
I went through a few days worth of these usual things – and the experience is insane. Load times when opening applications is effectively non-existent. Hulu videos just played, at full resolution, with almost 0 lag. CDs ripped into iTunes in minutes, and huge downloads – including the entire game of Portal on Steam, a task that brought my not underpowered Macbook down for almost a day, finished in under an hour. The game itself ran flawlessly. Flash games ran so fast that a friend of mine had trouble playing, being so used to a slower speed. Youtube videos streamed and loaded in seconds, even in HD. The Zune software, which I had been running at a snails pace on my netbook, was fluid and fast. Word, always a pain to load, taking forever to open, just was there.
But, while all these individual facts are impressive – the ease that the i5 handled everything I usually do on a computer was fantastic. But, I felt that this wasn’t enough yet. So did all the above tasks again – at the same time.
The total list of multitasking involved – playing 2 Hulu videos in HD, playing a Flash game, running a 720p Youtube short film, writing this post in Microsoft word, an assortment of sticky notes, 5 Gadgets, Paint, Solitare, downloading an iTunes update, ripping a CD, playing tracks in iTunes, streaming music from the internet in Zune, downloading and playing a 1080p HD movie trailer, playing two flash games, as well as running Portal off Steam. Oh, and Tweetdeck.
The result – I gave up. The i5 handled it all without a hitch, only maxing out at 80% of the processor’s speed. Part of it is just it being fast, part in the hyperthreading feature that lets it boost itself from a 2.27 Ghz speed to 2.54 (which, during the Multitasking mayhem test, it was full time). It was seriously, seriously, impressive.
Battery life was also never an issue – took a whole day’s worth of usage just fine.
If you’re looking for a laptop, particularly for school, there are some important things to consider besides processor however – a good keyboard for note-taking is huge, since that’s typically the most important thing you’ll need it for. If you’ve got a big campus, make sure that you look at the weight of the laptop – a few pounds doesn’t sound like much, but added to 3 textbooks, 8 notebooks, and 13 folders it adds up a lot.
But overall, based on my experience with the i5, it’s a huge positive – and something that, if you’re a student looking for a laptop and want to have a flawless way to run everything you do (and all of it at the same time), consider the i5.
As a disclaimer in accordance with FTC guidelines, the laptop mentioned above was lent to me by Intel for the purpose of this review as part of Intel’s Youth Review Program.
Intel Core i5: Multitasking Awesomeness ,
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