M6500 with 920xm vs i7-Q720, noticeable difference? no gaming

Hello, I'm migrating from the dell m6300 to the m6500, I have a couple of them here now. They both have the i7-Q720. With 16GB of ram I notice a difference browsing, things seem snappier loading and I can have a way huge greater amount of tabs and windows open. I do a lot of research and tab counts can occasionally get into the thousands with multiple windows open and 2 or 3 browser profiles.

I'm looking at an m6500 with the 920xm cpu and also has the ati 7820 gpu, which I require [both of mine have this ati gpu]. Is the 920xm going to give me anything noticeable performance wise, would 32GB of ram help as well? I don't do any gaming but may get into some video editing, also streaming movies. Also wondering if I'd be running significantly hotter/consuming more electricity.

edit: I am kind of thinking dedicating the 920xm machine to video editing and music production, with 32GB of ram. If the q720 runs significantly cooler and there won't be much performance increase with the 920xm maybe I'd leave it alone, keep the fans running less for one thing. Wondering if with these older machines if there was really that much difference between these 2 cpu's?
thanks

 

OK, I found a bunch of links which I'll post up later for posterity, with my limited hands on experience the takeaway seems to be: 920xm 55watts vs 45 on the q720 so yes more heat but my research tells me the ati gpu will help keep things a lot cooler overall compared to the nvidia. And people are saying the 920xm is noticeably faster, but then I don't do any gaming. The plan is video editing [which I haven't done any of either] and music production.
core search
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=palemoon&q=dell+m6500+920xm+vs+q720+cpu&ia=web

https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/5skcc9/should_i_upgrade_my_notebooks_cpu_i7720qm_to/

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-940xm-vs-720qm-820qm-920xm-benchmark.493765/

https://www.notebookcheck.net/920XM-vs-720QM_517_519.247596.0.html

 

Depends a lot, even in the price of such systems.
The 920xm will be around 30-40% faster than the 720QM, but both are destroyed by any low power CPU on the market available on new 400-500$ laptops..

Just having a current/last-gen CPU or GPU doing hardware encoding will make video editing much faster than any of those two CPU's.

 

I would not recommend any Precision M6500 for video editing or other multi core aware software. The CPU generation that comes in these machines have an almost non existent all core turbo boost. (100MHz for QM and 200MHz for XM models)

The fastest socket (upgradeable) mobile core i7 processors are 4th Gen. These CPUs come with much higher base clock frequencies and a much faster all core boost. (All models can boost to at least 2.9GHz on all cores, with 3.8GHz being the fastest on i7 4940MX)
I would recommend you look at the Precision M6800. (Faster CPUs, RAM and GPUs)

 

The price of such a used laptop(in the 300$ range for one on ebay with charger and not totally clapped out), plus postage, plus all the parts for the upgrades, you end easily dumping 600-700$ on what is at this point 6 gens old cpu's, with GPU's that will be either as old, or paying 300-500$ for a Maxwell or Pascal GPU, plus needing to mod drivers, and its a lot of time and money to keep an old system running, in the US you guys have crazy deals with laptops with i7-8750/9750 and 1660/1660 Ti's for less than 1000$..

I also like to thinker and upgrade laptops, but it gets tiring when you need to mod yet another driver to keep you old laptop working with Win10, and the cost of the parts will make the upgrade not all that savy, to me, upgrading 4 core laptops is a dead end, more so if you want to do some music production..

 

The big advantage with these Dell Precision machines has more to do with them not being built as a disposable unit.
While it may be nice that you can get that six core i7 + GTX 1660 machine for under $1000, it will have a consumer grade chassis and a light weight gaming class cooling setup (you will not be running sustained turbo boost clock on these machines.) The CPU and GPU are both soldered onto the mainboard and you only get 2 sots for RAM. The Dell G7 that's in my signature is fine as my wife's gaming computer, but I would not want to subject that machine to a 100% CPU+GPU usage stress test for any extended period of time.

My Precision 7710 on the other hand can run 100% usage nonstop with hot air going out the back of the machine and the keyboard never getting past slightly warm around the O key.

 

Thanks, just what I needed to hear, at least in regards to web browsing/general use. I have adjusted expectations about the video editing, from years back I had in the back of my mind that I may need to find a nice tower system used, maybe a few years behind bleeding edge. re: web browsing, researching purchases on Amazon has infuriated me for years, it takes forever for the page to fully load, duckduckgo says I'm not alone on this. Migrating from the core2duo m6300 with 8GB ram to the q720 with 16GB ram, Amazon pages now pop open instantly. I thought it was a fluke at first but it appears to be real. So, I think I will acquire an xm based M6500 to make things even more brisk in that regard, plus when I get huge tab counts going in multiple browsers.

Thanks, I have dialed back my expectations, maybe just get my feet wet with the M6500 for now.

Thanks, I've been running m6300's for about 8 years for general web browsing, the M6500 is a whole new ball game. I have adjusted my expectations about the video editing. I run Manjaro Linux, I have yet to see where that fits in with video setups. So far the music production would be cleaning up 2 track recordings, no virtual instruments involved.

edit: I should mention beyond installing ram I don't plan on tearing anything apart to upgrade, the two q720 machines I have will be perfect for my road use [see below], now I will just wait for the correct 920/940xm configuration to show up for home. They must have the ati 7820 gpu. I did install a nice new matte 1920x1200 screen so the real estate matches the external monitor. I bought 3 from a seller in Texas, $25 each and free shipping:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/151724693349?ul_noapp=true

Thanks, I resonate with this. For about 8 years now I have a kvm and dvi matrix system feeding cloned workstations in 3 rooms, all have 23 or 24" 1920 x 1200 native resolution monitors [2 are apple cinema displays]. For general use I could see using this for as long as possible, with the new life I'm getting with the M6500. I like the vibe of a $2000+ metal framed laptop, and need to have 4 of them, 2 active and 2 backup. That's a big part of going with these old machines. One stays at home on a dock, one I take about as I don't have gps or a smart phone, and I absolutely need backup machines. There can be no more than a few hours of down time. I'm being backed into a corner with my old 3G cellphone. I run Manjaro Linux, looking with interest and hope at the Pinephone which Manjaro is preparing an OS to run on it.

I'll tinker with the video but won't expect much, like I said above maybe look into getting a used tower to dedicate, perhaps with a larger monitor. Not sure about the increased electric bill though... For music production I do short 2 track [so far] improvs that don't involve any virtual instruments, so that's all low cpu stuff. Pairing these with a short video was my idea. Some years back I was thrilled to see the possibilities of the 4K, exactly what I wanted zooming in on small areas of nature videos. Then read about the computers needed to process [let alone the camera itself], whoa, hmmm, maybe later
Thanks to everyone who replied, much appreciated!

 

I still think you should at least go forward 1 laptop generation, the GPU and CPU performance jump from the M6500 to the M6600 is huge. Even if the laptop does cost a little more, it will be worth it in the long run.

 

Thanks, huge leaps are good. I'm kind of hung up on the 16:10 1920x1200 native resolution thing, to match the old 23/24" monitors I have and maximize usable real estate on the laptop itself. The m6300's had that and the m6500 was the last one. I haven't really used anything else and beyond reading stuff in other people's threads like "you'll get used to it" or something about losing space I hesitate to proceed. I clone the laptop image to the external monitor, I turn the large external screen off every time I walk away from it [save electric and keep the room cooler] then it's nice to have the laptop screen available for quick glancing at email/whatever. Any thoughts on the screen resolution thing?

edit: I also like the cool running ati gpu, if the m6600 is an nvidia furnace I don't know what to think. I'll look it over...
edit: I see an amd gpu is available

 

Back when I was running a Precision M6600 as my main laptop, The Quadro 4000M that came in mine ran very cool and quiet. It ran cool enough that I was running MSI Afterburner and using the fastest overclock settings it would let me apply for that card. The old Fermi based Geforce and Quadro laptop cards actually run pretty cool.

Screen resolution : 1920x1200 vs 1920x1080 you are only loosing 120 vertical pixels. Each person will react differently to it, but for me as a gamer and content creator I was always a little annoyed by the non-standard screen ratios 5x4 and 16x10. They always bugged me especially back in the day before you could set screens/video cards to maintain the aspect ratio of the displayed content.
Windows 10 does a good job with mismatched screen resolutions when cloning, anything older than that I can't vouch for as I didn't really use that feature. I prefer to extend my desktop when using multiple displays... Though for me now, I have a 4k screen on my laptop, 4k monitor on my fixed workstation and a 4k TV for my gaming desktop.