Stepping / revision i7

I noticed some have stepping/revision 2/C2 while others got the better 5/K0
Are there any others ?
What about the GPU ?

 

The only CPU's that are still readily available in the US, and Canada are the C2D Su7300 (while the Pentium dual core su4100 is another option, but for Canada it's refurb only) in the first revision of the m11x (the one without optiumus). The m11x 2nd revision (the one with optiumus) can come with a core i5 540UM or a core i7 640UM in the US and Canada. I believe there is a core i3 UM processor available elsewhere for the r2, but I know it isn't available here. The only graphics card available for the m11x right now is the nVidia gt 335m, and there no current way to avoid said card.

 

He's not asking about the diferent models of CPU, he's asking about the different steppings, which are basically newer/usually imroved die versions of the same series of CPU. These changes would not be advertised by the PC manufacturers and in the notebook market, you would only be able to tell which stepping you had by running CPU-Z or similar program.

 

Well in that case... I have no idea =D

 

Bought mine in August. Got 5/K0 revision. Overclocked to 164 with no problem whatsoever. I doubt there has already been another revision since August.

 

@THS Why do you say the 5/K0 is better?
I have the 5/K0 and while I have been able to overclock to 166mhz, my battery life is nothing to write home about, AND the overclocking seems not to have actually gained me much in performance.

 

I too have the 5/K0 but can never get a stable 166 overclock. The system won't even POST. It's happy at 155...

 

K0 stepping is a better stepping in general. It does not guarantee that every K0 is going to be a stellar overclocker, but on a whole, it should be better than a C2 stepping. Intel has stopped making the C2 stepping, so if you got one, it's from old stock. in a few months, hopefully everyone should be getting K0 as the C2's are used up.

Just because you got a K0 does not mean that Intel has changed their software/driver settings on the mobile chipsets or AW/Dell have made BIOS/software changes to overcome the max TDP that they want to let the CPU run at.

Now, if you use 3rd party tools to bump up voltage, disable throttling, and in general, bypass the built-in safety engineered by default, the chances are that if you got a K0 stepping CPU, that you should be abe to either push it further or maybe with less voltage than a C2 stepping CPU.

On the opposite end, using the same 3rd party tools, you may be able to underclock a K0 stepping either by reducing the default voltage it runs at and/or reducing the clock speed in order to save battery life.

This has been the trend in the majority of Intel and AMD's new CPU steppings........changes are 99% of the time made because of new instruction sets or improved manufacturing process...........usually things that make it BETTER. You don't think they would actually come out with a new revision to make it worse do you?

Another thing I'd like to add is what I've noticed from OCing. If I run LinX and only use 1 thread, watching CPU-Z will keep it my OC running at 2.1 Ghz (150x14). If i run 2 or more threads, my OC gets proportionally reduced. Max temp as reported by Real Temp really doesn't change too much between 1 thread and 4............this tells me that the clock is being adjusted to not exceed maximum TDP.

It would be nice to be able to disable HT in BIOS to see if benchmarking in lightly multi-threaded apps or even single-threaded apps improves. HT adds alot of CPU heat output and alot of us using i7 900 series desktop CPU's would disable it in order to get a higher overall OC, unless our main applications where Photoshop or other apps that were HEAVILY multi-threaded.

 

Thanks for all that info. Greatly appreciate it.