Laptop CPU - i5 or i7?

[laserbeam]

Hi,
I'm mulling over a laptop purchase and am wondering whether to go for an i5 or i7 processor. Can someone give me an idea of the performance differential between the two processors please? Is it small enough to make the power efficiency of the i5 attractive?

Thanks in advance for any feedback provided,


Regards,
Dave

 

[unclewebb]

Do you realize that there is a Core i7-620M which is actually a Dual Core processor unlike most of the Core i7 mobile CPUs which are Quad Cores?

It really depends on what type of applications you will mostly be running. The i7-620M runs at a much higher multiplier compared to a Core i7-720QM Quad core so in single threaded tasks or even many multi threaded tasks, its going to beat the Quad. The majority of games are not threaded enough to take advantage of a Quad so you'll be better off with the Dual Core as long as the GPUs are the same.

If you plan to spend all day running software that can take advantage of 8 threads then the Quad will likely be best.

Watch out for many Dell laptops that have significant performance throttling issues. Do a Google search for Dell throttle or throttlegate and you will come across an avalanche of information about this problem.