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Is an Intel Atom Dual Core upgrade worth it?

Despite Intel’s suggestion that the new Atom N330 Dual Core was made for nettops, that doesn’t mean netbooks can’t have them installed onboard. PC Corner is offering chassis upgrades to support the Intel Atom N330 Dual Core.

Question is — will an upgrade to the dual core Atom processor worth the performance gain and price?

First, it won’t be cheap. The chassis upgrade alone will cost you about Php4,000. Then, you will pay extra for the price of the dual core Atom CPU. All in all, expect to shell out about Php6k to Php8k for the upgrade.

Second, what performance increase are we looking at? Will it speed up browser performance? How about office productivity tools like MS Word?

Gaming maybe? But Intel says the Atom wasn’t built for gaming of heavy applications. That’s where the Centrino 2 comes in.

The Atom N330 will still be rated at 1.6GHz and the only solid update aside from the extra core is the L2 cache which is now doubled at 1MB. Of course, there’s the extra juice that the cores will suck off the battery.

Maybe a dual core Atom upgrade may end up more of a disadvantage after all.

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Avatar for Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

11 Responses

  1. Avatar for Griffith Griffith says:

    @martin – you’re right, i tried XP, Vista, Win7 and mac os x 10.5.8 on my benq netbook, im using mac os x as my OS now, well, everythings great, if i need to run a windows application, i just turn on parallels desktop..

  2. Avatar for myke myke says:

    when on the road I sometimes use my s10 to play counter strike and the performance is not bad

  3. Avatar for Herb Herb says:

    Its 2008 and still people would buy Gadgets on an empty promise ..

    Netbooks are for Girls..

    Real Men Carries 15″.4 ++ Laptops..

  4. Avatar for Martin Martin says:

    right now, the MSI Wind can run XP, OSX and Vista with no problems at all…that’s without the dual core processor…so why upgrade at all??

    buying a new one seems to be a better option..IMO

  5. Avatar for Jonathan Jonathan says:

    Don’t count on it. Intel don’t want to rival their own estate.

    Check some articles here:

    http://www.umpcportal.com/2008/09/dual-core-atom-cpus-in-netbooks-dont-count-on-it

    http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9538&Itemid=66

    I know these are just a little bit of speculation or rumor. – Who knows this might be good as true =)

  6. Avatar for entrepreneur opportunity entrepreneur opportunity says:

    The performance increase might not be worth 8k. You might as well buy a laptop instead of a netbook.

  7. Avatar for autocad tutorial autocad tutorial says:

    Very costly for an upgrade to dual core. Siguro they will release a dual core version which could be cheaper.

  8. Avatar for felipe felipe says:

    netbooks like msi wind, lenovo ideapad s10 and the likes cant “run” vista right?

  9. Avatar for calvin calvin says:

    yup, but just like Abe said mahal talaga. my friend who asked how much to upgrade his MSI Wind to dual core will cost him about 8k more.

  10. Avatar for Andre Marcelo-Tanner Andre Marcelo-Tanner says:

    PC Corner upgrades nettops or netbooks?

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