Whats the difference between the two processors? what would be better, between say, a 1.77Ghz Centrino, or a 1.83Ghz AMD Turion 64? which would be a better buy?
Those are difficult to compare because the centrino is built to use less battery life. It's comparing apples and oranges. That's why I thought you typed celeron and not centrino.
If you're looking for speed in a laptop, the AMD might be preferred. If you're looking for battery life, the centrino would be preferred.
While the speed of the processor is important, it doesn't necessarily make as much difference as you might imagine. If you're browsing the web, for example, processor speed is almost irrelevant - it's your download speed that limits you. If your machine has a slow disk, that may make a larger difference for many applications than processor speed.
Yeah definately go with the Turion. But anyways, centrino is NOT a processor. Centrino Mobile technology is what intel calls the combination of a pentium m processor, an intel chipset, and a wireless card. well turion has 64bit support, centrino doesnt, the turion has better performance, centrino has a bit better batt life. turion has 1mb l2 cache centrino 2mb is that a big problem? not is a big problem
I think at this point the type of processor and chipset doesn't matter as much as the other features of the laptop such as video card, brand-quality, pre-installed software, display etc.
Honestly the processor matters the most nowadays because of Vista. It will be full 64bit support and run better on an AMD based machine then on an Intel based centrino duo.
The AMD Turion64 is the better processor for everything except video encoding and citrix based applications. It runs faster and will multi-task better then the intel cpus. And the battery life issue is not an issue because its the difference of 2-5 minutes of battery life at most.
the biggest difference between the two processors is the the AMD has 64bit support whereas the centrino or pentium m does not. Although the new intel centrino duo's are cheating the 64bit standard with their dualcore technology, that is still slower then the native 64bit support found on the AMD Turion64.