AMD Turion 64 X2 mobile technology TL-58 processor ( mobile )

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Fast
Ease of Installation	Good - quick to install
Manufacturer Support	Satisfactory
Instruction manual	Satisfactory
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	speed, perormance, no dodgy intel media graphics
Disadvantages:	none really

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I have a nice little Acer Aspire 5520G laptop with this processor, that I bought last December from Tesco Direct. One of my major worries when I bought the laptop was that it had an AMD processor as apposed to an intel processor. In the past I have used intel Pentium D, Intel Pentium Dual Core, Intel Celeron M, Intel Celeron D, Intel Core 2 Duo, Intel Pentium 3 and well you get the idea, lots and lots of Intel processors. Having never used AMD before I sought advice from an IT expert at college and asked whether there were any major differences or problems with AMD. He told me that although AMD had had some bad press in the past they had been getting better and that he had a computer that used an AMD Duron that was fine. After this I opted to buy the computer regardless of the AMD processor, and I am very glad I did.

SPEED
The processor operates at 1.9 Ghz which is not the fastest processor in the world, the fastest in the family of processors is the Turion TL-66 at 2.3Ghz. This speed is definately not bad though, with many intel laptop processors coming in at around 1.6 Ghz to 2Ghz. The speed is definately more than fast enough for the standard home user and probably fine for business use or even professional use. Although it is not the fastest it is still reasonable, and it has to be said that being a laptop processor it can not be expected to reach the same speeds as desktop processors which I have known to reach 3.2Ghz.
For anyone out there who is not technologically minded like me, and who does not understand Ghz, Mhz etc, it is quite fast, that is the simple version.

PERFORMANCE
The performance of the processor is great and it really is good at being a steady processor, in that it does what you tell it to do efficiently at a constant speed. One thing I hate about Intel is that their processors often tend to work fine one minute, slow the next, work overtime the next day then have a day off so on and so forth. This little baby, on the other hand works hard all of the time. It is fast and efficient, though it does, on startup use 100% of the cpu. This means that on startup it can not handle doing any more than it is already. In idle usage it uses anywhere from 0% to 5% which is quite good. The only fault is that when you start something up from an older disk, ie: a 'minimum' system requirements disk that is not specifically compatible with vista it occasionally throws a paddy and starts trying to work overtime and figure out what to do. All in all though, a steady and very good processor with regards to performance.

MULTITASKING
When it comes to multi-tasking this processor is second to none. It can run endless applications with no trouble at all. It is dual core, and unfortunately it does not look like a quad core will be along for laptops for a long while, however this is the creme de le creme of dual core processing. It can run a couple to three high power tasks at once with ease or up to about 7 to 10 lower power tasks easily. I woudl not reccomend doing so but that is just an example of how uch it can do at once. I have been easily able to run about 3 conversations on MSN at once, along with microsoft office word(2003) and the internet (ie explorer 7) all at once. Some of this is no doubt helped by the 2GB of ram that my computer has, however whether or not it is very good.

WINDOWS EXPERIENCE INDEX
For those of you who are using Vista on your computers you will no doubt know of the windows experience index and how it can be used to explain your computer's performance to you. Each score is out of 6, and this processor gets 4.7 out of 6. A very respectable score indeed.

One other thing worth briefly mentioning is that there are many processors out there that are prone to crashing, I once used Intel Celeron M processors and they crashed at every chance they were given, This one seems virtually crash proof and has not carashed on me once, so that is a good thing too.

CONCLUSION
This is an absolutely great processor and I can easily reccomend it to anyone. Please do not be put off by the name AMD as it is truly better than any Intel processor I have ever used.

I hope you have found this review helpful and if you would like any more information ust leave me a message. Thanks for reading, and goodbye for now.