# How Important is GHz?



## L.A.

Hey Guys,
I've been thinking about a new/used laptop lately, and while looking up black Friday sales, Some of these have less Ghz than my old stuff.

My desktop 
Dell GX270 = 2.8 Ghz

My laptop 
Dell c610 = 1000Mhz

The new laptops vary from 1.5 GHz to 2.2 GHz.

What does this really tell me?

Thanks,
L.A.


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## Nevada

Processor GHz is the frequency that the processing registers (the little transistors) charge & discharge. While that's important, it doesn't tell the entire story.

Of the two computers you are considering, there is a huge difference aside from the GHz. The 1 GHz (1000 MHz) C610 is a Pentium 3 processor, which has a lot fewer processing registers than the 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 processor in the GX270. That means that the actual processing speed of the GX270 is a lot more than 2.8 times the C610, perhaps twice that speed.

Running even XP will be pretty sluggish with a Pentium 3 processor. There is really no economic advantage to going with Pentium 3 processor over a Pentium 4 processor, since Pentium 4 machines are available at rock-bottom prices.


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## Gary in ohio

The computer speeds use to be the only thing that mattered, but now it is of less interest since few computer go over 3ghz and the difference now are in the technology.

Depending on what your budget is, skip both of these older machine. Seeing some nice BF deals under $300 for some pretty nice computers. I would recommend you stay away from "atom" based computers, but other intel and AMD would be nice. 



The Dell c610 laptop is a $50-$75 computer. Its slower than the desktop and even a cpu generations back. If its ultra cheap it would make a nice travel laptop but your not going to want it as your primary computer The Dell GX270 is a $100-$150 computer. If your paying anymore then your paying to much. and if you go much over $150 you getting close to new computer prices.


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## Guest

His post says that those are the 2 computers that he has and he is considering replacing them with newer computers.


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## HermitJohn

Still all gets back to what you want to do with your computer and what software you need to run. An 800mhz single core computer can be perfectly functional for somebody just wanting to surf and do email and even watch videos. But if you can can get at least a 2ghz single core, that would be better and they are not that hard to find. A 3ghz single core even better.

I only moved up so I had such niceties as USB 2.0 ports and could boot from USB without it taking half hour to do so. Any computer with 2.0ghz single core should at least provide that. And smaller variety linux distributions can run perfectly fine on even 500mhz computers with 256mg ram and still run video. But you arent going to do lot multitasking. You watch a video on a 500mhz computer and thats all that is going to be going on. Now if you want win7, forget the single core and go with at least a duo core and you are going to need a computer that has several gig ram. In other words you want a new computer and 64bit operating system (yes there is 64bit linux). Be aware the cheapo entry version win7 is only 32 bit. Not what you want on a new computer with multi core processor.


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## Nevada

I just helped build a 3 GHz Pentium 4 machine for my daughter. She wanted Windows 7, and it worked a lot better than I thought it might with a single core machine. The only issue we had was with the video adapter. While the native SVGA driver worked, it was sluggish. I got a video card that had Win7 drivers at eBay for $20, which solved the problem.

The point is that if you add a little memory and install Win7 you could still use the 2.8 GHz Dell GX270 machine for the foreseeable future. The C610 is obsolete to the point where I don't know what you might do with it, besides dump it at eBay.


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## arabian knight

Yes I would agree with that. Most Pent 4's are selling cheap now because of the duel cores are what most are in computers now.
And on this iMac I have a 2.66 GHz. It is a duel core.
But in Apple things the GHz don't mean as much as a PC one.
As this 3 and nearly 4 year Mac is fast. But then again the duel core has a lot to do with it also.
And boy even with a Pent 3 running XP and low on Ram that Dell was s-l-o-w.
And cost was way to him to even think of doing a Upgrade on it.
And most new software now wants to run on the faster speeds. So getting anything that was good "back in the day" is just not worth it anymore to even fiddle with. imo.
With All the Service Packs that come out running Windows, you sure want to have the speed and the memory to handle them.


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## HermitJohn

Nevada said:


> I just helped build a 3 GHz Pentium 4 machine for my daughter. She wanted Windows 7, and it worked a lot better than I thought it might with a single core machine. The only issue we had was with the video adapter. While the native SVGA driver worked, it was sluggish. I got a video card that had Win7 drivers at eBay for $20, which solved the problem.
> 
> The point is that if you add a little memory and install Win7 you could still use the 2.8 GHz Dell GX270 machine for the foreseeable future. The C610 is obsolete to the point where I don't know what you might do with it, besides dump it at eBay.


So did you get the 32bit win7?

As to the C610, I dont see lot point to it, since faster laptops are available pretty cheap, but Puppy Linux would be very happy with 1ghz processor and 256mb ram.... It would still be quite useful for most things, just dont expect to run more than one resource intensive program at same time. Thing is I just bought a computer off ebay with 2ghz processor and 500mb ram for $40 shipped. I only upgraded cause I wanted a laptop that had usb 2.0 ports and that the bios supported booting from usb drive. My old laptop had usb 1.1 ports and you had to do a workaround to get a usb drive to boot, and such workaround boot was SLOW. The "new" laptop also had a dvd burner built in. Old one just had dvdrom. Much more bang for buck than cheapest Asus EEE netbook. Thing looks like it had very little use.


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## Nevada

HermitJohn said:


> So did you get the 32bit win7?


Yes. I don't think you can use 64-bit Win7 with a P4 processor.


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## Kung

You can with some of them. Would I recommend it? No. LOL


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## L.A.

Thanks everyone,

I guess I don't understand the combination of GHz and processor.

Here are two laptops:

Is one better than the other?
Everything else is comparable. 


AMD Fusion E-450 dual-core processor
1.65GHz, 1MB L2 Cache


Intel Core i3-370M processor
2.40GHz, 3MB Cache

L.A.


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