Intel i-7 620m or i-7 720qm

I will soon buy a laptop/notebook, but what core is the best? The Intel i-7 620m or i-7 720qm?

 

off the top of my head:
620m is dual core
has integrated video card
uses less power

720qm is quad core

it depends which laptop you're looking at and what factors are important to you

 

I was looking at the alienware m17x, and i want to have the best core.

 

Best for what? They excel at different things. The 620 will give you longer battery life and lower heat, and will trounce the 720QM in single and dual-threaded loads. Once you start getting to 4+ threads, the 720 takes over.

 

Best for gaming and do hard tasks

 

What are hard tasks? Most games don't take advantage of more than 2 cores, but I doubt you'd even notice a difference from even the i5-520M since games are typically GPU bound.

 

I would personally go for the i7-720qm. It is more powerful than the 620 but will shorten battery life. If you are talking about a cpu dependant application/game go with the i7-720qm, it will handle everything you throw at it, and it's a quad core which makes it a bit more future proof than a daul core. Some games can only utilize two cores, but others can utilize more, but games being produced now are going to utilize more cores.

 

There's a difference between utilizing more cores, and doing so efficiently. The Core i7-720QM would need 90% non-redundant utilization on all four cores to beat the i7-620M.

 

The 720QM has no performance advantage over the i5-540M or i7-620M in almost all situations... there are several threads on NBR and other sites where users have benchmarked these CPUs in single, dual, and multithreaded programs.

 

i would get i7-720qm.. its a quad and future proof in a way.. Also , i wouldn't get an M17x.. It still has DirectX10.1 cards.. there are better options out there with DirectX 11 but only single cards... U can get an Alienware M15x with GTX260M and get an ATI 5870 , which is DirectX 11 to replace the GTX260M... or u can get a Sager NP8690 or 8790 depending on whether u want 15 or 17 inch... also comes with a 5870... or lastly , there's the cheapest of the lot , Asus G73... all these options are better , cheaper and still give excellent performance and all come with DirectX 11.0 ATI 5870... but an i7-720qm is a minimum if ur looking to keep ur notebook for 2-3 years..

 

That's just plain wrong. The Core 2 Duo T8300 is 2 years old and it's still perfectly fine.

 

That's because when you bought a C2D the movement to quad core on laptops wasn't fast approaching. Every day that goes by things will shift towards quad core optimization. Dual core won't disappear overnight and will still perform well but the situation under which you bought that C2D and righ tnow are different.

 

I tend to disagree strongly with that rationale.

I remember when I was looking at Core Duo processors and a salesman was trying to get me to buy into an AMD X64 processor because their "64-bit nature meant they were more "future proof". we know how that turned out. by the time enough apps take advantage of 4 cores, the quality of quad-core processors will be significantly better. and between now and then, you're just spending money on potential, getting little of it relative to the more efficient competition, and reducing your battery life for the wear.

I don't see a "speedy transition".

will Adobe CS5 support quads more favorably than dual-cores? if not, it won't matter at all to me for some years still.

 

haha, CS5 is indeed heavily multi-threaded(at least photoshop). but if you REALLY give a damn about performance, you might as well go for a nvidia gpu and use CUDA and the adobe mercury engine.

 

My point is more about price than dual vs quad; the T8300 was a ~$250 CPU when it came out.

The i7-720QMs speed of 1.73GHz on 4 cores and only 2.4GHz on 2 cores is just too low to justify it over 3.067GHz on two cores in the i7-620M. You're sacrificing as much as 20% of your speed on two cores for the possibility of around 10% on four, and that 10% is far from trivial to attain, because you have to do just as good a job of splitting your workload between four cores as you did with two. That's easy for something like video encoding, but in many other circumstances it's not as simple as splitting a video into four parts.

If you're really serious about spending a large amount of money, you can go with the i7-820QM or i7-920XM, but with that kind of money you might as well buy a new laptop every year.

 

I talked to one of my friends about a quad ore a dual, and he said that the quad was better becaus it has turbo mode.

 

The dual also has a form of turbo. i7-620m hits 3.33Ghz when using a single core.

 

damn its so hard to decide what to take. Tell me what you would take and why.

 

I would take the 720qm if I could afford it. Why? Just for bragging rights.

 

With the i7-620M you can say you have the fastest laptop dual-core, though.

 

but the i7-720qm is still better whatever u throw at it period.. it has way more cores so it can handle more data at one time.. it also does 2.8GHz on 2 cores i think , which isn't much of a slouch.. in normal day stuff , i7 quad will feel faster.. anyways , it will most likely use less power than i7-620m... the i7-620m has seemed to pull a lot more power than 35W TDP... the i7 quad doesn't pull as much power under load... so u'd get better battery life...

 

No, it's not better "period". It only does 2.4GHz on two cores, which is a lot slower than the i7-620M's 3.067Ghz. You also won't notice the difference between them in "normal day stuff".
As for power efficiency, I haven't seen anything conclusive either way. I'd like to see proper testing under equal workloads.

 

I got the i7 720QM, I'm really happy with it, I have yet to find a way to make it lag, I can convert movies and music and still use my laptop normally without any problem.
I liked the fact that it's a quad core, so more future proof, and I'm also planning on upgrading to the 920XM in the future, since they are built on the same frame.
Like others said, you probably wont even notice the difference between the two. I dont know, I'm happy with the quad core, but I'm pretty sure the 620m would have been a good choice too.. ahh decisions.
Do as Padmé said, go for bragging rights

 

It's hard to weigh the relative bragging rights of the i7-620M and the i7-720QM - the i7-620M is the fastest laptop dual-core there is, while the i7-720QM is the slowest Clarksfield. Besides, the i7-920XM will get you more brag-for-buck.

 

Meh, the ratio brag/buck isnt optimal, as it costs like a thousand dollars

 

It's 10 times the brag for 3 times the buck.
Overclockability, being the single fastest notebook CPU, the ridiculous amount of power it eats, the "Extreme Edition" moniker - these things add up if you're looking for bragging rights.

 

Just stop dude, your excuses have all been stomped repeatedly XD

For a mobile CPU there is no excuse to not get the i7-620m I would want to get a i7-620m on my Asus G73 but alas, not an option.

It runs cooler (which is always good in a laptop form factor), it's faster at everything you do right now. It has a built in GPU to save you battery life/electricity when you are just sitting around browsing the net.

saying that the i7-720 is futureproof is bull. That was the same excuse people were using for the core 2 quads when they came out. They were slower compared to dual cores when they came out and they are still slower.

Besides by the time mutithreaded applications become common you will have a octocore processor that hyperthreads to 5.0gh

Dual Cores have been out for like 15 years and they're finally being utilized to the fullest....

 

Like I said before, after reviewing benchmarks and coming to my own conclusions I went with the i7-620.

 

Well if you want to futureproof, get an i7 820 or 920, for 720 the difference from 620 is too small even when running all 4 cores.

820 onwards the dual core turbo multiplier is also much improved, with 2.8ghz at 2 cores compared to 2.4 of 720. 8mb of cache as well.

 

If you want a laptop quad-core without having to sacrifice significantly on performance (though there's still the sacrifice you're making on power consumption -> less battery life and more heat), the i7-820QM and i7-920XM are the ones to get.

If what you want is futureproofing, take that bunch of extra money you were going to spend on slight performance improvements, and invest it safely.

 

Ok here is why getting the i7-720qm is more future proof.
In the future prices of these processors will go down.
With the i7-720qm you can upgrade at a later date to the i7-820QM or the i7-920XM.

With the i7-620m your stuck with it.
No way to upgrade as it is the fastest of the dual core i7's.

 

This is false. Getting an i7-620M doesn't mean you can't upgrade to a quad core. Please read the thread and go through benchmarks, getting a 720QM is NOT and never will be more "future proof" than the 620M.

 

I think im going whit the 720, it seems to me its more "hi-tech" than the 620.
Thanks for the help everyone!

 

Your listening to the advice of people who have no idea what they are talking about?

My home desktop PC has a Q6600 and is not slower at all during normal day to day tasks. This is compared to my current desktop setup in my sig.

The results speak for themselves, the 620 is perfectly fine and will be for a very long time. Unless the program is heavily multi-threaded (so only business apps), the 620 is much better than the 720, your wasting money/ could have a better processor. Even if the program is multi-threaded it is shown that the 720 is not even that much faster anyways.

Your call though.

 

For single threaded, or dual threaded apps = 620

This includes surfing the web, creating a word doc, viewing videos, most games. For every day use it would be a fine choice.

Quad core apps = 720

This includes workstation apps like cad, engineering simulations, video encoding, some newer games.

If you have money to burn, want the ultimate in bragging rights = 920XM. This will run anything you throw at it.

When I got my set up they did not offer the 620 or I would have considered it very seriously. I needed a processor that had the highest clocks I could get. The game that I use is single threaded and is CPU intensive. That means really the 620 or 920.

 

Some of the spewing in here is crazy. lol Do you guys just write stuff without thinking about what you are writing?

Stuck with the 620 and can only upgrade if you buy the 720? What in the world kind of statement is that?

Future-proofing a laptop? Do you realize how retarded that sounds? It isn't possible to future-proof a laptop. Not even the 920XM will future-proof it.

 

The very idea of futureproofing a computer is silly. Think about it in financial terms - you're paying extra money now for value later. However, computers decrease in value exponentially, so you can be almost certain that any extra money you spend on "futureproofing" won't pay off. If you want actual futureproofing, make a sound investment.

That's not to say that it won't be worth it to some people to spend extra money on certain components. If you know what your needs are, and the cost of a faster component is worth it to you for the time you'll save, go ahead.

However, when it comes to the i7-720QM, the previous points are mostly moot, because the fact of the matter is that it's slower overall than the i7-620M, no matter how you look at it. Its performance envelope is between ~22% slower and ~13% faster than the i7-620M. The i7-720QM will only be faster in rare circumstances where it's possible to spread the workload very evenly between 4 cores - tasks like video encoding and 3D rendering.

 

Well, I don't think this is what they meant, but I do know that with the 8740w Elitebook, if you order a dual-core processor, they'll only solder in two of the four memory slots; you need to order at least the i7-720QM (or the 820QM, since they don't currently offer the 920XM) to get all four memory slots. That's a rather specific case, though.

 

By futureproofing in computer talk, it means running better in the next 1-2 years.

For me though it's already running better, since all my compilers/CAD softwares already make full use of all the threads.

 

NO ONE WRITES PROGRAMS THAT TAKE ADVANTAGE OF MORE THAN TWO CORES A THE MOMENT!!!!

And odds are it will stay that way for many years to come. And majority of the time by the time you need to upgrade your CPU your GPU is already a bottleneck and tada! Excuse to get a new computer.

i7-620 is much better for a laptop. It's faster, it's cooler, it IS BETTER.

 

To be honest the 3 viable "hi-end" processors right now are 620m, 820qm, 920xm. The 720qm doesn't outperform 620m enough (and performs worse than it in many cases) to justify the extra power consumption. If you're not planning to move it at all then sure go with a 720qm because if anything, it won't hurt and it seems it'll make you feel better since it has 4 cores.

If you want a processor that will be competitive for a long time I think the 820qm and 920xm are the way to go. Remember, if you don't plan to all of a sudden start using more and more demanding programs in the future then theoretically your processor never becomes obselete.

You can indeed upgrade from a 620m to 920xm on many laptops (dependant on whether the notebooks can handle the thermals). Just look at all the laptops that are being offered with the i5 duals and i7 quads.

 

Only majority of the games are not written to take advantage of more than 2 cores, but almost all professional softwares like CAD softwares, encoding softwares etc are all making use of more than 2 cores.

 

Wow such strong opinions....NO ONE?! Maybe not games or office software, but most enterprise server apps will be multithreaded (and we're talking way more than 4 here) but then again on a laptop its pointless to have 4 core processor.

 

Your statement is okay up to the last sentence. I only have a laptop, and find my time is valuable to me. So having 4 cores to video encode saves me a significant amount of time.

If you look at the basic specs of each processor in relation to clocks and core usage it’s pretty obvious where each processor stands.

So really a lot of the posts here reflect how each individual feels about the argument between the 620 and 720 processors, and not necessarily the facts about the performance difference between the two.

With that, it's up to each individual to determine the needs of their computer and decide the merits of each processor and choose.

 

I'm quite sure CAD apps need more cores and should work better with a quad.. anyways , i7-620m might look good on paper but it ain't so good for stuff engineers and other ppl do... quads are way better in this case..

 

It's just not as simple as "quads are better than duals". The i7-720QM can't make up for the i7-620M's advantage in clock speed in almost all situations.

Sure, in a few of the apps "engineers and other ppl" run, quad-core will offer an advantage (we're only talking around a 10% advantage, mind you), but do you really think that all such apps they work with will be coded well for quad-cores? In the apps that don't, the i7-620M will have a much greater advantage.

 

I use CAD with dual cores at school, E8400s to be exact, and there is no change in performance when I bring it home.

 

Those wolfdale E8400's are very good processors

I have one myself OC'd in my desktop at 4GHz on air.

 

Yes they are very quick, obviously they are not overclocked at school, my point was there is no noticeable difference in performance between them and my desktop.

 

This argument is an odd one for me. I WANT a Core i5-520m so badly I'd PAY to have my i7-720m replaced with it. Specifically because I want a cooler running dual core with a slightly higher turbo mode.

But you know what? Freakin Asus, freaking EVERYONE for that matter (except Acer, ironically) says that if I want an ATI 5730 in my N61, then I MUST EAT the Core i7-720qm.

All you guys in here, I totally agree, I WANT that dual i5 SOOO BADLY. But if I want this GPU, and if I don't want to wait forever or pay an absurd amount of money, I am FORCED by the market to get it.

So please, someone here tell me it will be ok anyway. Tell me that it will be fine and I wont notice too much difference. I really wanted a dual core and consider this quad a downgrade, but Asus decided how things would be, not I.

Sympathy?