How much does quad core vs dual core matter for normal media consumption (reddit browsing, youtube, netflix etc.)? Zenbook UX433FA vs Vivobook X512FA?

[c0mplexx*]

Title says it all pretty much. I was about to buy a Zenbook 14 UX433FA but then noticed a Vivobook X512FA with better on-paper specs for nearly $291 less. Though I suspect the screen is worse in terms of quality which is important for me

 

[Fasauceome]

Even the dual core celeron in my chromebook is good enough for youtube and LTT browsing. An i3 does the job very nicely.

[ConduitCreator]

If you´re just trying to browse the web the dual core is plenty for must things you do. 

[Radium_Angel]

6 minutes ago, c0mplexx* said:

Title says it all pretty much.

Dual core is okay, provided other parts are up to the task, such as a good SSD, and lots of RAM.

Personally I won't own a system with less than 4cores these days, but YMMV.

[SupaKomputa]

For office and light browsing 2 core is more than enough.

For 1080p media consumption the 2 cores will be fully utilized, wont have anything else for other stuff.

Netflix changing the requirements frequently, today maybe ok, but tomorrow i don't know.

For long term usage, i think 4 core is minimal nowadays.

Also look for AMD laptops (ryzen based), they are cheaper and offer better performance, if you don't mind shorter battery life.

[Bombastinator]

Not all specs are better.  Vivobook is heavier and battery life is shorter.  If those don’t matter to you though they don’t matter.  The one that does seem to matter is the screen and that is not mentioned.  Only a percentage rating which I think talks about bezel size.  The big question I think is what monitor panels they have.  That is not mentioned.

[TVwazhere]

33 minutes ago, c0mplexx* said:

Title says it all pretty much. I was about to buy a Zenbook 14 UX433FA but then noticed a Vivobook X512FA with better on-paper specs for nearly $291 less. Though I suspect the screen is worse in terms of quality which is important for me

Notably, that's a dual core with hyper threading, which will actually be pretty close to the quad core performance assuming clock speeds are the same. Single core performance will actually be better on the i5 since it can turbo higher. 

[Kisai]

36 minutes ago, c0mplexx* said:

Title says it all pretty much. I was about to buy a Zenbook 14 UX433FA but then noticed a Vivobook X512FA with better on-paper specs for nearly $291 less. Though I suspect the screen is worse in terms of quality which is important for me

 

That zenbook will probably last longer on the battery but it will absolutely suck to use. By all accounts that Vivobook is a better option, but that battery, woof, terrible.

 

For reference, most 14" Dell laptops come with 42Wh batteries.

 

You should always prefer the minimum 4 core over the 2-core, as pretty much every 2-core laptop I've run into at the office was slow as molassas just running typical office365, and I wish I could tell people to at least opt for the 15".

[c0mplexx*]

2 hours ago, SupaKomputa said:

For office and light browsing 2 core is more than enough.

For 1080p media consumption the 2 cores will be fully utilized, wont have anything else for other stuff.

Netflix changing the requirements frequently, today maybe ok, but tomorrow i don't know.

For long term usage, i think 4 core is minimal nowadays.

Also look for AMD laptops (ryzen based), they are cheaper and offer better performance, if you don't mind shorter battery life.

wait 1080p will really use the entirety of it? I switched from an i3-2120 to a R5 1600 on my PC and I remember it being sorta fine, tho laptops CPU is a U series one I guess

Ryzen laptops seem to be non existent in my country besides like 4 gaming laptop models i'm pretty sure

 

2 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Not all specs are better.  Vivobook is heavier and battery life is shorter.  If those don’t matter to you though they don’t matter.  The one that does seem to matter is the screen and that is not mentioned.  Only a percentage rating which I think talks about bezel size.  The big question I think is what monitor panels they have.  That is not mentioned.

yeah it's screen to body ratio since its something I care about. The zenbooks screen is IPS with 100% sRGB iirc and I can't really find anything about the Vivobooks screen besides that it's 1080p, saw a few vids on youtube and there were comments mentioning the screen is rather bad (which is why im looking more towards the zenbook). 

How bad is that battery life tho? I don't really understand laptop battery lifes

 

2 hours ago, TVwazhere said:

Notably, that's a dual core with hyper threading, which will actually be pretty close to the quad core performance assuming clock speeds are the same. Single core performance will actually be better on the i5 since it can turbo higher. 

so the dual core should be fine right? just worse than the i5? to my understanding the screen on the zenbook is better so i'm looking towards it but the CPU kinda spooks me

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

That zenbook will probably last longer on the battery but it will absolutely suck to use. By all accounts that Vivobook is a better option, but that battery, woof, terrible.

 

For reference, most 14" Dell laptops come with 42Wh batteries.

 

You should always prefer the minimum 4 core over the 2-core, as pretty much every 2-core laptop I've run into at the office was slow as molassas just running typical office365, and I wish I could tell people to at least opt for the 15".

is it that bad? I mean my PC used to be i3-2120 with 4GB ram until like 5 months ago and it wasn't that bad. around how many hours should the vivobooks battery last? I have a hard time understanding WHours and more comfortable with mah but not sure how to convert ._.

[Bombastinator]

It might be possible to find out what panel each used by checking out repair part numbers.  That could tell you what the actual panel is.

[c0mplexx*]

Just now, Bombastinator said:

It might be possible to find out what panel each used by checking out repair part numbers.  That could tell you what the actual panel is.

oh seems to be a 1080p IPS panel

checked reviews too and they mention colors are washed out on the vivobook

 

while the zenbooks screen issue is that it's not bright enough and is glossy

[Bombastinator]

23 minutes ago, c0mplexx* said:

oh seems to be a 1080p IPS panel

checked reviews too and they mention colors are washed out on the vivobook

 

while the zenbooks screen issue is that it's not bright enough and is glossy

I was thinking more model numbers which would tell you lots of things by looking them up, but whatevs.

[steelo]

4 hours ago, c0mplexx* said:

Title says it all pretty much. I was about to buy a Zenbook 14 UX433FA but then noticed a Vivobook X512FA with better on-paper specs for nearly $291 less. Though I suspect the screen is worse in terms of quality which is important for me

 

I'd say it's a matter of personal preference. I have a friend with kids who use low powered netbooks with ARM processors, mainly for watching youtube and netflix. I was very surprised to see it run youtube at 1080p with no issues. It was actually pretty decent for browsing websites too. I mean if modern day smartphones with ARM CPU's can play youtube and Netflix on 1080 resolutions, I'd say just about any relatively modern x86 CPU will be able to as well.

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, steelo said:

I'd say it's a matter of personal preference. I have a friend with kids who use low powered netbooks with ARM processors, mainly for watching youtube and netflix. I was very surprised to see it run youtube at 1080p with no issues. It was actually pretty decent for browsing websites too. I mean if modern day smartphones with ARM CPU's can play youtube and Netflix on 1080 resolutions, I'd say just about any relatively modern x86 CPU will be able to as well.

They only can because they use Quicksync on the Intel iGPU. the iGPU can do h264/h265 playback, but not VP8/VP9 (partial support only)/AV1(none), and everyone is going to jump onto the AV1 this year apparently.

 

Netflix switched to AV1 today for android devices. Youtube doesn't yet force AV1. 

 

Side note, SmartTV's this year will also be capable of AV1.

 

So ultimately it might not matter right now, but if you are forced to watch an AV1 stream, I guarantee that both of those devices will choke. Youtube right now uses AV1 for all HD content, but YMMV.

[c0mplexx*]

13 minutes ago, Kisai said:

They only can because they use Quicksync on the Intel iGPU. the iGPU can do h264/h265 playback, but not VP8/VP9 (partial support only)/AV1(none), and everyone is going to jump onto the AV1 this year apparently.

 

Netflix switched to AV1 today for android devices. Youtube doesn't yet force AV1. 

 

Side note, SmartTV's this year will also be capable of AV1.

 

So ultimately it might not matter right now, but if you are forced to watch an AV1 stream, I guarantee that both of those devices will choke. Youtube right now uses AV1 for all HD content, but YMMV.

wait so if an iGPU doesn't support the format what happens? from what I understood, on smartphones it will just result in worse battery performance since there's no hardware for it. Is it basically just that on laptops as well?

[Bombastinator]

3 minutes ago, c0mplexx* said:

wait so if an iGPU doesn't support the format what happens? from what I understood, on smartphones it will just result in worse battery performance since there's no hardware for it. Is it basically just that on laptops as well?

It will have to decode using the full cpu.  Probably a whole core will be devoted to doing so.  Basically it’s an argument for 4 core I think. I’ve got an old haswell that can still watch av1, but it’s fast 4/8.

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, c0mplexx* said:

wait so if an iGPU doesn't support the format what happens? from what I understood, on smartphones it will just result in worse battery performance since there's no hardware for it. Is it basically just that on laptops as well?

It uses the CPU, but you need like 2Ghz quad core to "passibly" play AV1.

 

The encoder requirements are nuts and a half though:

Quote

A CPU-based encoder requires a beefy system, so it's no surprise the real-time encoding specifications for SVT-AV1 are no joke. SVT-AV1 requires Skylake-generation or newer Xeon processors with at least 112 threads and at least 48GB of RAM for 10-bit 4K video encoding

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-svt-av1-open-source-encoder,38551.html

 

Decoder:

 

http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2018/Introducing-dav1d , requires icelake, which is a 10th generation Intel chip.

 

So as we're not yet in a phase where one can comfortably say what the requirements for AV1 is, devices may still be shipped that are incapable of playing the video optimally. So in those cases, they may played at lower frame rates or at quarter-resolution if that's the only option. 

 

Quote

None of the tested CPUs could deliver above a 30 FPS average for 4K AV1 content.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=dav1d-libgav1-AV1-performance

 

[Bombastinator]

12 hours ago, Kisai said:

It uses the CPU, but you need like 2Ghz quad core to "passibly" play AV1.

 

The encoder requirements are nuts and a half though:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-svt-av1-open-source-encoder,38551.html

 

Decoder:

 

http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2018/Introducing-dav1d , requires icelake, which is a 10th generation Intel chip.

 

So as we're not yet in a phase where one can comfortably say what the requirements for AV1 is, devices may still be shipped that are incapable of playing the video optimally. So in those cases, they may played at lower frame rates or at quarter-resolution if that's the only option. 

 

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=dav1d-libgav1-AV1-performance

 

Hmm.  I didn’t try to encode anything and I don’t know what resolution it was. Certainly not 4k. 1080p or less certainly.