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I found this one for sale on Ebay. I've also been looking at Starlabs website and am considering this machine.
I'm wondering how the older Core i5 chip in the Dell on Ebay would fare in the real world compared to the newer Core i3 chip as fitted to the Starlabs machine. The two chips seem to have similar specs when compared on Intel's site, in fact the older i5 has a higher base frequency than the i3 but a slower turbo speed and a 3mb cache as opposed to the i3s 4mb. Would 1mb of extra cache make more difference than the extra base frequency? Is the new chip just automatically going to be better because it's more up to date? There's a Core i7 chip available from Starlabs as well but not sure it'd be worth the extra £££. Considering the use the machine will get it might be overkill. Then again why drive a Morris Minor when you could have a Jaguar?
Perhaps the Dell on EBay would be a reasonable bet for now. It's running a clean version of the latest Ubuntu so if I don't feel at home with that I could just live boot a few different distros from USB til I find one I get on with and if I felt I wanted a more up to date machine in the next year or so I could probably sell on the Dell without losing roo much.
If I went for a Starlabs machine I'd probably configure it with 16gb of RAM which I expect would be plenty. Would the 8gb in the Dell be sufficient? My old Win7 laptop has 4gb and starts to struggle if I have a lot of tabs open.
Ok, I'm probably over thinking things a bit here and the Dell will be more than adequate for my needs just now but I'd welcome any thoughts or opinions on the above you'd care to offer.
As far as my computing needs go it's all fairly lightweight just now. The most resource hungry thing I might be doing is working with multitrack recordings on a Digital Audio workstation. Other than that it's mostly just surfing, word processing, printing and scanning. Nothing very stressful at all.
I'm wondering how the older Core i5 chip in the Dell on Ebay would fare in the real world compared to the newer Core i3 chip as fitted to the Starlabs machine. The two chips seem to have similar specs when compared on Intel's site, in fact the older i5 has a higher base frequency than the i3 but a slower turbo speed and a 3mb cache as opposed to the i3s 4mb. Would 1mb of extra cache make more difference than the extra base frequency? Is the new chip just automatically going to be better because it's more up to date? There's a Core i7 chip available from Starlabs as well but not sure it'd be worth the extra £££. Considering the use the machine will get it might be overkill. Then again why drive a Morris Minor when you could have a Jaguar?
Perhaps the Dell on EBay would be a reasonable bet for now. It's running a clean version of the latest Ubuntu so if I don't feel at home with that I could just live boot a few different distros from USB til I find one I get on with and if I felt I wanted a more up to date machine in the next year or so I could probably sell on the Dell without losing roo much.
If I went for a Starlabs machine I'd probably configure it with 16gb of RAM which I expect would be plenty. Would the 8gb in the Dell be sufficient? My old Win7 laptop has 4gb and starts to struggle if I have a lot of tabs open.
Ok, I'm probably over thinking things a bit here and the Dell will be more than adequate for my needs just now but I'd welcome any thoughts or opinions on the above you'd care to offer.
As far as my computing needs go it's all fairly lightweight just now. The most resource hungry thing I might be doing is working with multitrack recordings on a Digital Audio workstation. Other than that it's mostly just surfing, word processing, printing and scanning. Nothing very stressful at all.