Say you have the same amount of budget. You are given a choice between two notebooks. One is the top line heavy duty high performance notebook, which inevitable generates a lot of heat and unavoidable noise even though its cooling system works quieter than most desktop systems do. The other notebook is about a half or three quarters of the speed of the former. But it offers absolutely no sound and no overheating, which is my dream machine. Which one do you prefer?
Personally I would opt for less noise. I can't stand a noisy computer. Have to find the best medium, a slow computer is also a pain.
Is the performance model gas powered? Why would you contemplate between two vast differences? The obvious first question is just how much power does the machine need to posses for it to accomplish the tasks you are going use it for?
Right now I am running a high performance NOISY laptop. There are times in the day I observe that when the fan turns off, I noticeably de-scrunch my shoulders. Clearly the fan is stressing me, even if in a slow creep way. On the other hand, the previous laptop, though cooler and quieter, could not run five or six programs simultaneously and was limited to three without serious risk of crash/hangs. I can have a chat pgm, data feed, Outlook, Excel, and even Word all open without conniptions. The odd thing about noise in general is that if you take a moment to observe, you already filter quite a bit of it out... the mind acknowledges it and relegates it to something it's already classified and thus doesn't need to reprocess. It only hears changes to what it's already processed. I think the fan is troublesome because it turns on sort of randomly, making the tune-it-out scenario harder... but not impossible. I am working on not letting it get to me. Mind you, I do not prefer a hot and loud PC, but given the two choices, I know so-so performance is not an option, having experienced the performance improvement. I only hope PC makers improve power consumption/dissipation in the next few years so that my next upgrade will be both hot performance and cool running. Ana Maria
The real bottleneck is the dog slow hard drives in notebooks. When they can develop flash memory drives of 20 gig or more at a reasonable price, the low power CPU will be less important for overall system performance.