i7 720qm vs. i7 920xm

Okay, it is kinda of obvious that the i7 920xm is ALOT better but, how is the gaming performance??? i have a 720qm right now i wan want to know if $350(ebay: laptop monkey FTW lol) is worth the upgrade for the laptop will it shoot my fps up(ingame)? If so what percent you think???

My specs:
Nvidia GTX 460m
4 gig of ram DDR3-8500 (need to upgrade to 8 gigs of DDR3-10600)
320gb HDD ( need to upgrade to the seagate XT hybrid)
1600x900 Wled screen


Thanks in advance,

Matt

 

With that graphics card and your resolution you will see almost no increase in gaming performance. In fact in some games performance will be crippled because the CPU will be sucking too much power and the GPU will begin to throttle. Not worth it if you don't need it for other things such as encoding and doing high amounts of processing.

 

A 920xm won't gain you much fps in most games, but what I noticed was for example improvement of the behaviour of the A.I. in a couple of games, e.g. the latest AC. The enemys don't just stand around, they're all moving...

I guess this depends on how the game is coded, but it really makes some difference in quite some games, though it wont increase your fps.

Anyway, with a 460m you might be better of without the xm, for reasons mentioned by widezu69.

 

I've heard of xm CPUs sucking the power from the GPU. But is it really that significant? o.o

 

They do if you increase the multiplier and the TDC. Other then that if you run it stock I don't see there any problem. I believe with your gpu, you can overclocked them both pretty high without any problem.

 

Yes, it is significant when you are OCing your CPU. My 940XM requires a TDP of 95W to run it at a multiplier of 26X across the cores. And a 460M requires a power of 65-70W when running at full load. So out of 150W total provided to your system, CPU and GPU takes all the power and other things like HDD,RAM,1080p screen requires power too. This results in power bottlenecking and hence the performance of the system is throttled.

If only gaming wise, I would keep that 740QM and be satisfied because you'll not see any difference in FPS with a XM.

 

As above. If you push a 920 or 940, you can get it to run at 26x for all 4 cores - that will draw enough power to affect the 460m. However, (noted in another post) a lot of games are not so sensitive to ultimate CPU speed - so you can use the flexibility of Throttlestop (thanks again Unclewebb) to back the seeings for some of the cores to reduce power demand by the CPU to give the GPU more power (e.g. run at 27, 25,18,18) or some such. This would allow you to reserve the "all out" cpu settings for applications that can really use the CPU horsepower, such as video editing..

Joe

 

so, using a 240W power brick will overcome this bottleneck, right ?

 

Unlikely. The power limits are more likely a function of restrictions imposed by power tables coded into the BIOS to protect the mobo and components from power in excess of design limitations than actual output limits of the 150W PSU, which has shown a remarkable capacity to provide power well in excess of its nominal rating. I have a 240W PSU, but have seen no difference from the larger PSU except cooler operating temperatures.

 

I saw a big difference in bfbc2 after upgrading my m17xr2 from a 720 to a 920xm. It'll depend on the game though and since your system has one gpu the result may not be as dramatic as it was for me.

 

Not much increase i can imagine the only place i can see it really is when it comes to stuff like PS and rendering in 3d software.

A fast dual core actually might preform better than a quad core for certain games. I had a i7 640m dual core and it ran crysis 2 at roughly 47fps. I recently upgraded to a i7 820qm and i only get about 34fps with crysis 2. quite a big difference but i do mostly rendering and it really does help 8 threads when rendering is nice