820QM vs 920XM

I'm going to order soon and debating weather to get 920XM witch has bit higher clock speed and can be OCed with 500gb x2 raid 0,
or
820QM with an intel ssd and 500gb hd.

I would like this laptop to last a while and I game and vid edit from time to time. Just not sure whats a better choice.
What are your opinions on this?

 

neither.. get the i720M(or the cheapest if you're upgrading immediately), save $500 and buy a 920XM on e-trash. If you really want the warranty bit.. go for the 820 (although again, I'd suggest the 720) there really are just very small performance differences between the three processors, and even less between the two you're looking at.


I had the RAID 0 array of 500GB 7200RPM drives and found it completely satisfactory for nearly anything. If SSD's are faster I don't see how I would be able to notice.

 

oh thanx for the fast replay, I'm not exactly sure how to upgrade the processor so not sure. Plus kinda scared to mess up such an expensive piece of equipment. Just read a lot of ppl are saying that SSD's are way faster then anything, and are worth getting, but kinda iffy on the prices of them and the sizes.

 

Only you can answer this,You know your needs & requirements .In my opinion i would not waste the cash on a 920xm .The 820qm ssd & 5 hundred for storage would be my route if i had to make a choice between both.

 

unless you're going to be doing a lot of workstation or multimedia editing or processor intensive tasks outside of gaming, save some cash and pick the i720. Anything more is a waste, the numbers just don't justify the $300 for the 820 or $$$$ for the 920. You're already ahead of the QX9300 with the 720

 

the 920 just seems way over priced, but no I don't edit that much. Mostly looking for a top of the line lappy that would get me through 4-5 years of school. Just kinda iffy on the hefty price of the 920, not sure would OC be worth it?
I'm leaning more towards 820 atm, Any difference between then besides the OC and the clock speed?

 

Explain please

 

Here's a chart from Intel on the i7 mobiles - 720, 820 ,920...

differences highlighted in red.

 

I completely agree there is no real reason for the extra clock speed since you could simply ''hack'' the clock speed there are present hacks to use turbo boost to your preferences and to clock it in your OS. There is also no difference between the number of transistors in the i720M and the 820QM or any other architectural differences its simply MARKETING.

-GOOGLei

 

2.8ghz vs 2.53, 4 physcial cores + 4 more exe cores versus just 4 physical, 1,333mhz fsb vs 1066mhz fsb, superior Turbo boost clock speed scaling.. same TDP
Notebookcheck: Review Intel Core i7 Processor "Clarksfield"

do you need more explanation or will that suffice? I'll concede that in *some* situations the larger 12mb cache helps the QX9300, however in the vast majority of instances it performs identical or superior to the QX9300. It costs $750 less doing it too.

 

WOW nice chart ty! I would go with 720 like lozz said but just to be on the safe side... The 820 is $270 more isn't that big of a price jump. Just want to get the most out of AW laptop

 

The 820 is your best bet then. Enjoy!

 

Your wrong QX9300 has unlocked multiplier any benchmarks i have seen both cpu's in comparison Qx9300 wins easy.In the right machine the QX9300 can be overclocked to 3.7 GHZ

 

Indeed, the i7 720 is not on par with the QX9300. Maybe at stock speeds they can compete, but with the OC ability of the QX9300 the 720 can't match it. Hell the QX9300 decently OC'ed can hold it's own against a 920XM in "some" cases. This was proven before somewhere here in the Alienware forum and can be found if searched for.

 

I'm wrong? I stated that the i720 is on par with the QX9300. I didn't say it was on par overclocked. The OP is looking for OTS stock performance, so overclocking a 9300 isn't going to be a consideration.

 

Dude, just get the 720QM and use that balance u saved to get a good backpack that will save your backbone 10 yrs from now and a Razer mouse that will save your wrist too..

The difference of speed for the 820QM is minimal and you really will only see 2-3fps better in reality.

Most my work is for 3D modeling and rendering where cpu, ram and hdd is most important. Was considering the Dell Precision, but i only get the quadro 2800 and wxga (1440x900) for my budget. Better off with M17x RGB LED wuxga (1920x1200) and the fastest mobile gaming card available...

I'm into my first week of the long wait... Sigh.. I've already memorized the user manual and service manual and every hardware glitch others faced. Prepare for the worst and hope for the best-as they say...

 

While I agree that the i7's are better then the core 2 quads, you cannot and have not been able to compare clock speeds in many many years. If you want to do it that way I have a p4 toshiba satellite here that runs at 3.2ghz that will crush them all.

The i7 quad chips run better then the old q9000 and q9300, it wont be a landslide but the i7s will win. As for the difference it is minimal between the 720qm/820qm/920qm. The only real difference is the cahce and even that is not going to make a difference unless you do alot of encoding. Even then its a matter of a few seconds for the price of $300+. Even if you make a ton of money an hour it will most likely not pay itself off over the time you have the laptop. If your lucky and keep the laptop a long time it may will break even.

 

Umm, yes you can? i7 is superior to C2D.. so at the same clock rates it's going to perform better. It's not like even half of applications today are designed for anything beyond 2 core use, so turbo-boosted processors are still going to be running fairly quickly.
in anything except quadruple threaded applications the i7 is going to swoop the 9300, and if the application supports more (for say, the remaining 4 HT cores) then it'll have even less of an advantage.



Besides.. Northwood is so far behind the effecniency per clock cycle of the C2D and core I7 it wouldn't keep up with any of the processors we're discussing.

 

As a remember mandrake compared the QX9300 with the 820QM.
Note that he also preffered the T9900 for everyday use so if you have a powerfull processor and dont use the extra power its just unneeded heat and powerdrain.
With great power comes great responsability...
So maybe just go with the I7 720 or max the 820

 

It was for this reason that when I spec'ed out my replacement R2, I went with the 820 even though I could have paid the difference for the big dog. I don't OC anything (with the exception of my Q6600 in my desktop, and even then its a mild/reliable OC) so I didn't need the added expense. I took that cost and through it at other areas of the laptop to have a more enjoyable machine. Now all I need is the darn thing to arrive!

 

A few years ago when intel started going ghz Means everything and Amd started pointing out ghz mean nothing Intel started eatting there own words. When the Amd chips at lower clock ran faster then a intel P4 3.4ghz chips or higher chips.

Intel went back to the p3 chips becuse they seen the laptop core duo (P3 rebuilt) can overclock faster then the P4 and run cooler. That when the core 2 came out.

You have to look at what you are useing your system for. Ghz, Gpu or Ram. If you use know what the software useing it then buy it. If it dont It a waste of money.

DO NOT FALL FOR THE GHZ MEAN EVERYTHING.

 

Just my penny's worth - save the money and get the 720QM ) Upgrade graphics, memory, screen, network card and get a large HDD. You will have a laptop that will be relevent for 10years. SSD are too new a technology so you will pay a premimum for them - better to wait 2 or 3 years and use a HDD cloning tool to swap you HDD with a much cheaper SSD.

 

No you cannot. Want to know why? A 1.6GHz 720qm will crush a q9000 2.0GHz cpu. The former has 400 less MHz then the latter yet in grunt work it crushes it. If your rules of comparing clock for clock speed were true then the q9000 would crush the 720Qm. Oh and I am not comparing the cores when the turbo feature is enabled. Rather standard clocks.

Another situation was my 1.66GHz core Duo (not core 2 duo) absolutely demolished my 3.2ht desktop that was OC'd to 3.66GHz in every real world or benchmark single threaded application.

So NO you CANNOT compare clock for clock of different processor lines/generations/manufacturers/editions/etc. You can only compare processor clock speeds if the CPUs you are comparing are all apart of the same line, manufacturer, generation, and edition. Otherwise there is no way to compare them. Granted each Hz is a pulse no matter how you slice it, but what that architecture can do with that pulse determines how powerful the chip is, and not how many pulses it can do per second.

But you can say that one is more efficient per clock, but then you're not comparing clock for clock at that point.

They sacrificed efficiency with the p4 line for higher GHz so they could sell more CPUs...and it worked. People saw 3GHz+ and flocked to intel platforms, but little did they know that netburst architecture was misleading and sacrificed alot in the name of marketing.

 

lol what?! Turboboost automatically enables when the processor is loaded, ie the 720 is *not* going to be running @ 1.6ghz when you're running some kind of application that uses a lot of system resources. It runs at a lower clock speed(just like the c2d does) when not loaded, that speed just happens to be 1.6ghz. You *do* understand that the core processors are essentially c2d CPUs with ht, a faster fsb, better fab production process, better throttling(in the forum of turbo boost) and a bit more level3 cache right? The only reason the i7. Crushes the 9000 is because it runs at a faster clock speed, the other parts help a bit, but the majority of the grunt is from the higher binned nature of the core processors and the higher clock speeds from that. When you can find an article that has managed to disable turboboost and let the 720m run @ 1.6ghz permenatly *and then* compare it to a similar c2d I'll concede. You won't however, and here's some evidence

 

Lol they do not use a FSB like the core 2 duo architecture does.

 

The m17x only utilizes dual channel memory, so quick path and the imc are not fully utilized anyway. Clock for clock the core i7 *will*
Be faster, but not so much faster that you can't compare the two.

 

You cannot compare clock for clock unless the pulse does the EXACT same thing per each CPU. The architecture, instruction set and so on determin what each pulse does. Again a Hz is a Hz but whats done with that pulse is different for each generation/model/manufacturer/etc and cannot be compared to one another. Again this is why a 1.66 mobile chip running on a 667MHz FSB cushed an over clocked 3.2HT @ 3.6GHz on a 800MHz FSB.

 

errr...my understanding is that Turbo only activates when certain thermal and power conditions are met. If all the threads are loaded and the cpu is pulling it's full 45watts then turbo will not be engaged(sic). Generally turbo mode is only active when a few threads are running and the cpu temperature is low enough for the faster clock speeds AND the power requirement is =< TDP.

http://www.intel.com/technology/turboboost/

 

Turbo engages and adjusts the CPU speed according to load and demand first. It will throttle again if it exceeds certain temperatures or power demands. That's not any different than any other mobile processor however.

 

One thing that bugs me though is that according to the software PassMark the 820QM is not as fast as my current QX9300 therefore if I had to upgrade I would be bothered to take a CPU that is a downgrade from what I currently have. On the other hand I am not sure how good that software can be trusted for benchmarks of CPU.

 

The i7-720QM gets 1/1/6/9 extra Turbo Boost bins on 4/3/2/1 cores, with a base multiplier of 12 (= 1.6GHz). The result of this is that its maximum speeds are 1.73GHz maximum on 4/3 cores, 2.4GHz on 2 cores, and 2.8GHz on one core.

I don't know how well the i7-720QM sits within its limits on power and current, but I would suspect that much of the time it will be able to boost up to pretty much maximum speed.

In any case, if you're looking at performance in highly parallelized applications, you're comparing a 1.73GHz Nehalem with HT against a 2GHz Penryn without it.

To the best of my knowledge, Nehalem is not much faster clock-for-clock than Penryn for many tasks, only ~5%, but in tasks like 3D rendering and video encoding the Nehalem is something like 30% better (due to architectural differences and HT). This would mean that the i7-720QM should be a little faster than the Q9000 in tasks like these, which make heavy use of a number of relatively equal threads.

However, where the i7-720QM will beat the Q9000 severely is in tasks that only use one or two threads, because Nehalem can use the extra power from switching off the other cores to make the remaining one or two much faster.



When comparing the i7-820QM and the QX9300, it's entirely feasible that the QX9300's much higher clock speed of 2.53GHz is too much of an advantage for the i7-820QM to beat it in most heavily multithreaded applications. However, the i7-820QM can run at 2.8GHz on two cores or 3.066GHz on one with Turbo Boost, so it should win in many other tasks that only run on one or two threads.

 

Thanks for your explanation. Can you give examples of common programs where you think the QX9300 would be faster and a few other where the 820QM would be faster?

 

Well, if you want a rough indication, your best bet is to look at some benchmarks like this and this comparing the i7-920XM and QX9300. Try to take note of what they say about multithreading of applcation, and keep in mind the relative clock speeds of the i7-820QM and i7-920XM when you're comparing.

Note that I'm taking my info on Turbo Boost specs from Wikipedia

i7-920XM - 2.26GHz on 4/3, 3.066Ghz on 2, 3.200GHz on 1
i7-820QM - 2.00GHz on 4/3, 2.800GHz on 2, 3.066Ghz on 1
i.e. we're looking at clock speeds of ~12%, ~9%, and ~4% slower for the i7-820QM respectively. If you take the clock differences between the 820 and 920 into account, and the different types of tasks, you should get a good picture of the performance difference between the i7-820QM and QX9300 from those reviews.

 

Thanks for those links, very interesting reads. Explains why my old desktop still outperforms my laptops... When I built it, I focused on a very balanced setup as I do some gaming, but also do a lot of multimedia oriented authoring. I am trying to do the same with my replacement R2 and as such, I am favoring the processor a little more (going with the 820 over the 720) as much of the software I use is processor dependent, but I do still have a few games that I play, so I have the dual ATI's for that (and one of my software programs can make use of the dual GPU's for rendering) so happy times (as long as I don't have some of the other issues that the R2 has).

 

Thanks for the information and the links. It roughly answer my question and I believe from what I see the QX9300 is going to be slightly faster or as fast as the 820QM.

The advantage is the the 820QM might be more future proof.

 

exactly! Thank-you! This is what I've been saying the entire time.

again, thank-you. A far better explanation than I was willing to devote time to.

 

So a QX9300 with an average overclock at 3.066 GHz will outperform the 820QM in multithreaded applications and could be compared with the 920XM, correct?

 

when running 4 threads, essentially yes. The problem is that very few applications have quad core support. If it does happen to use more than 4 threads then you have an additional 4 executable cores with the 820 but strictly four with the 9300, so the 9300 would loose a lot of it's advantage. You'd have to try to find a situation where you're using *only* 4 threads for the 9300 to claim a big victory.

 

True, I would have to have both R1 and R2 in order to make comparisons... even though the nature of thread execution is serial rather than parallel (ie CUDA) that's why I made that hypothesis