How bad is this processor?

imeem · 12 Aug 2010

How slow is this processor? Athlon II Dual-Core P320 2.1 ghz

This is going to be in my sister's laptop. She's going to watch movies/videos (non HD), stream videos, stream music, photoshop and maybe other adobe product usage, web surfing, flash games, and facebooking.

A person who works at the laptop section for Best Buy said that processor can't do photoshop because it is going to be very slow and it can't play facebook flash games..... I think this information he provided is very false since my sister's pc, which is slower than the laptop she wants can do photoshop and play flash games.

Please make a response quick because the laptop is on sale for $399.99 CAD (from $549.99 and $499.99). Thx.

Petey7 · 12 Aug 2010

I'm sorry. For a second I thought you said someone told you a dual-core CPU can't run flash games and Photoshop. My old ~600MHz Pentium 3 could handle flash games fine and ran an old version of Photoshop, so certainly that thing can.

According to this that processor does about average for an upper-mid range CPU. It's no i7, but it is up there with the i3.

imeem · 12 Aug 2010

Petey7 said:

I'm sorry. For a second I thought you said someone told you a dual-core CPU can't run flash games and Photoshop. My old ~600MHz Pentium 3 could handle flash games fine and ran an old version of Photoshop, so certainly that thing can.

According to this that processor does about average for an upper-mid range CPU. It's no i7, but it is up there with the i3.

Well yeah.. that guy basically did tell me and my sister that that processor can't do run photoshop and can't play flash game. And he was trying to persuade us into buying a mac laptop (imac? mac book?). Same with the worker at Sony Style, but she didn't do the mac talk.

Petey7 · 12 Aug 2010

Sounds like he was just some Mac fan boy.

Looking at the actual specs of the processor, it looks like Photoshop might be a little slow, but I've seen the newest version run fine on a lower spec machine before.

logicearth · 12 Aug 2010

I use photoshop and pretty much all thing things you mentioned, just look at my specs below.

imeem · 12 Aug 2010

logicearth said:

I use photoshop and pretty much all thing things you mentioned, just look at my specs below.

Yea but, i think ur processor is faster than the one i mentioned.

Petey7 · 12 Aug 2010

No. His is a 2.0GHz, the one you mention is 2.1GHz, so you would actually have a better processor. It definitely has a much better score on that page I linked to earlier.

imeem · 12 Aug 2010

So should my sister buy that laptop?

Darician · 12 Aug 2010

For the price, it's not a bad deal and it should be okay.

fANAT1C · 13 Aug 2010

imeem said:

Petey7 said:

I'm sorry. For a second I thought you said someone told you a dual-core CPU can't run flash games and Photoshop. My old ~600MHz Pentium 3 could handle flash games fine and ran an old version of Photoshop, so certainly that thing can.

According to this that processor does about average for an upper-mid range CPU. It's no i7, but it is up there with the i3.

Well yeah.. that guy basically did tell me and my sister that that processor can't do run photoshop and can't play flash game. And he was trying to persuade us into buying a mac laptop (imac? mac book?). Same with the worker at Sony Style, but she didn't do the mac talk.

They just want to get the most of money out of your purchases. Sony is a good brand, so is Apple. The only thing that differs from Sony/Apple compared to other laptop brands is that they are more expensive (they're really good, but I'm not an Apple fanboy).

The fact that the processor "can't" run Photoshop doesn't make any sense. Photoshop runs on basicly every computer that is able to run Windows XP/Vista/7, if only you've got a decent graphics card and enough of RAM.

I used to run Photoshop CS3 on my pentium 4 3.0 GHz/Nvidia GeForce 5500 FX 256 MB AGP and it did it's job remarkably fine. A better processor is never a bad purchase, but if the rest of the hardware can't compete with the power of the processor it's useless to upgrade.

I'm using Photoshop CS5 too from time to time and it runs perfect (maybe because I've worked on a slow PC for years). Check my system specs, it's a laptop.