Which processor is better for gaming?

Would the i7-640 be better for a gaming notebook than a i7-740 since it has a higher clock? I'm gonna be running a Nvidia geforce gtx 460m. And it will be in a Sager/Clevo 8690 with 8 gbs of ram.

 

In some games yes (those using max 2 cores), in some games no (those using more than 2 cores), however there is a tendency that more and more games use more than 2 cores, so I'd say that the quadcore is more futureproof.

 

The i7 640 is a Dual Core processor.
The i7 740 is a Quad Core with more cache but a lower overall clock.

In say GTA 4 or Saints Row 2 even maybe some games like Far Cry 2. The i7 740 would be a better processor very much so.

Unless a game is limited to one thread or even some reason 2, the quad will perform well. In comparison between the two the dual will prevail in some areas but in comparison with older Core 2 Duo's the i7 will outperform higher clocked dual cores in many situations core for core. The memory bandwidth is also higher on the 740 might help a little.

I vote the 740.

 

Okay. Im new to gaming laptops and just recently decided i wanted to buy one, but i really dont know a whole lot about them. I was wondering if i should wait till around march to buy one since most of the new tech will be out and the older stuff will be cheaper.

 

If you want to go nvidia, i dont think the 500 series actually fixes any issues in design, just higher clocks with some improvements in performance. I would only wait if your going ATi. Mind you there should be signifigant improvements with sandy bridge they wont make your current choice obsolete.

Graphics cards these days still go obsolete faster than CPU's. Many people are gonna tell you to wait fact is, its up to you and you could "Wait" forever as its getting better every 12 months.

 

I've been reading up on Sager and Msi alot and for the most part everyone has nothing but good things to say about them. I like the price on the MSI but the Sager has good specs.

 

Not always true. My X9000 @ 3.6GHz was much faster than core i7s in coresmark's dual core test. CPU Benchmark for New Multi-Cores i9 i7 i5 i3 CoresMark 2010 WorldWide Ranking
My X9000 is at the #42 spot while the closest mobile i7 is a 940xm at the #67 spot.
I would take the i7-740qm over the i7-640m. Quad cores are nice and coming from a high clocked dual core I really like the i7-740.

 

Your X9000 is also double the clock of the 740 and not even near stock clock. I was refering to the average mid 2 Ghz processors that were offered a little over a year ago when I was shopping. I would hope you gained some ground with your overclock. I understand that you understand, i just dont feel I expressed it was faster than the best of them. Best of the stock C2D's was 3.06 ish? I forget what the T9900 was but the T9800/X9100 was 2.93 out of the box .5 over my multipler.

 

i7 quad core wins obviously its a stronger cpu and stronger = better.

Just a quick elaboration why its better though.

Firstly the i7 quad cores support turbo boost. So if you had a situation where a game is not multi threaded for 4 cores it will overclock 2 cores to a higher clock speed....

That is however if it was needed. Chances are its not because any game that is so out of date was made for older hardware that was slower and less in-efficient than an i7 so 2 cores of the i7 quad core are probably faster and more powerful than the 2 cores of the cpu's at the time that game was made even without the power of turbo boost.

Plus the other 2 cores on the 4 core cpu can take care of any background tasks and cpu overhead that the dual core would have to run on the same 2 cores as the game.

Gaming in general is not very cpu dependent almost always its a gpu limitation anyways. The few cases that is not true are most commonly the super cpu heavy games that use all 4 cores of a quad core and almost require one to play properly.

In summary, quad core can do almost anything a dual core can, but it does not work the other way around.

Go for the i7 quad.

 

Thats a benchmark, its a synthetic score not a real life result.

The OP is asking about cpu's for gaming.

In a game having a CPU super fast is not going to give you better performance because the GPU would hold you back first.

If were playing a really old game say CCS or Half Life 2 where the gpu also can render very fast up to 200+ frames per second. Having a dual core @ 3.6ghz giving you 250fps is no better than a quad core giving you a 160fps because both of them are easily above the 60fps mark that you are able to see/use due to your monitor restrictions.

Even if you had 120hz monitor you still wouldn't notice a difference.

Dual Core days are numbered, Quad Core has too many advantages especially real life advantages. All the dual core has left now is just dual core based benchmarks... and even those are in rarity most benchmarks are multi threaded

 

Yes I agree. My X9000 always put out great benchmark scores even in wprime's 32m test it was only took 2 seconds longer than my 740, but in real life applications/games I love my quad.

 

When you overclock the quad you get more of an boost per clock speed too.

In a theoretical world your dual core @ 3.6ghz has 7.2ghz of processing power (2 cores @ 3.6ghz)

the i7 740 has 4 cores at a measly 1.73ghz so that would be about 6.92ghz of processing power.

This shows the i7 is more efficent per clock already, but you had that dual core heavily overclocked from 2.8ghz to 3.6 a gain of 800mhz.

Do that same overclock on the 740qm and make its clock speed 2.53ghz per core and suddenly it sky rockets to a theoretical 10.12ghz of processing power because it gets double the benifit of overclocking in a perfect scenario.

And these perfect scenarios are not a pipe dream, its normal things like video encoding that maxes out all 4 cores to 100% during the entire encoding process.

Overclocking my i7 720QM from 1.6 to 1.8ghz knocked off several minutes of encoding time for me when doing a video.

My 1.8ghz overclock was lightweight too limited by my FSB (RAM), people that have unlocked multipliers have reached over 3ghz stable in normal operation per core and up to 4ghz+ with extra cooling for benchmark operation.

3ghz quad = 12ghz theoretical processing power It would be almost 2x faster on wprime than the x9000

 

I nabbed the 82nd slot on my factory overclock. 3.2Ghz if the multipler jumps from 10.5 to 11 on either core at a time. Tried pushing 3.4 bsod from ram all the way.

Not the best conditions running either so I would say the i7 has a chance

 

Stock frequency of T9800 is 2.92ghz, T9900/x9100 is 3.06ghz. Just out of curiosity, how hot does your T9600 run in your G50 at 3.3ghz, Clutch? My x9100 shoots to a max of around 80 C at 3.6ghz under load.

 

Under load... no freaking clue these days. Cooler than the video card ever will? The original P series ran cooler because I was undervolting while overclocking. My idles are normal, the gpu gets hotter because of the cpu at load. I run mid 70's when playing Sins of a Solar Empire which even at 8x speed when it starts to choke it doesnt get hot.

Cant say I have ever seen it past 80's except in artificial attempts to make it run hot.

 

Well, it should not exceed the temp of the 9800M gs, even my x9100 at 3.6ghz runs about the same temp as my 9800M gs, about 80 C. What really sucks is that the GPU and CPU share the same fan, if the CPU runs too hot, the GPU will suffer too.

 

Heh I routinely hit Low to high 90's on the gpu. Sins runs in the low 70's but games like GRiD and Far Cry 2 push it to the breaking point.

 

If I could do it all over again, just for Battlefield Bad Company 2, I would now purchase the i7, since it was programmed more for utilizing the CPU, because of simulating real world physics, such as the effect of gravity. Infact most simulations rely heavily on the CPU for doing these kinds of computations, unlike the GPU which processess more the visual effects. Take for instance Microsoft FSX and Falcon 4.0. These kinds of games really immerse you in a virtual world more so then just flashy graphics because it takes the tiniest details into account like wind speed, velocity, trajectory and stuff like that, that's meant for CPU processing and not GPU, well unless developers get on board and START USING PHYSX!

I knew this with my experience playing simulations modeled after actual Airforce simulations, and I still went with the i5. T_T

Oh BTW Battle Field 2 Bad Company is very much a simulation, for it takes into account real world physics and models it to scale, every explosion, bullet and missle trajectory, is being calculated real time. The next generation of games in order to create even more realistic worlds will have to mic mic real life down to the littlest even invisible detail (wind, gravity etc) and traditional programming is fined tuned to utilizing CPU, but again Nvidia PhysX if embraced by the programming community could change that for the better.

 

That is bad, I assume you repasted your CPU/GPU but have you replaced the thermal pad on the north bridge with some quality thermal paste as well? I was previously unsure about whether to replace the thermal pad because it looks too thick to be replaced by thermal grease. But later I thought what the heck, even if it failed, I can still put the thermal pad back, so I replaced it with a rather thick layer of ICD-7, and it lowers my CPU temp by around 7 C!! If you are still using the thermal pad on the north bridge, you should try replace it with something better, it will definitely help!!

 

I'd go with the quad, but I actually think that waiting a month or so for Sandy Bridge is well worth it in the case of quad cores. It's your choice of course, but the 30-50% increase is enough to ensure that your CPU will handle everything thrown at it for a very long time, plus you can actually get more than an hour of battery life. Still, if you found a good deal now, the 740QM is still a great choice. Besides, we don't know if any gaming SB notebooks will release in January.

 

i7 740m is only quicker than the i7 620m when running off all cores and even so it's only by about 13%. I don't think theres any contest in single threaded situations and it even beats the i7 740qm in a lot multicore processes. Do you really want a 13% speed increase sometimes and a much inferior speed most of the time? 740qm is definitely not superior to 620m don't let the fac that it's 4 vs 2 dilute your opinion.

 

You run alot of unoptimized physics heavy non gpgpu accelerated games? Bet SR2 would give it a run for its money and still have GTA 4 bring it to its knees in comparison.

That said personally id still be overclocking the quad.

 

GTA 4 is one of the few exceptions where quad core is really needed and it's a really poorly optimized game. Neither SR2 or WOWC run on all cores and they are considered CPU heavy games. But still the 620m will probably run the latter two on a slightly better fps. GPU is still overwhelmingly the most important factor in gaming unless of course the game is really crappily optimized like GTA4. I just fail to see how the 740qm is a step up from the 620m is terms of gaming when it isn't the case. If you are running on a budget then it is better. A better choice is the 840qm but even that will not run most games better than the 620m because of the clockspeed!

 

Sucks that SR2 doesnt benifit from a quad. The only other GTA type game I play and it barley runs on my rig.

 

It runs fine on mine perhaps it's your graphics card! It's common knowledge that most games still don't really need quad, the cores can't do a lot when they are sat around idle. With games getting targetted more and more for consoles who knows what will happen though!

 

There isnt any reason Saints Row 2 couldnt have been written to utilize upwards of hundreds of threads if a processor was available to run it. It makes thousands of decisions prior to each frame render.

Its most definitely CPU bottlenecked over here. Problem with these games is all of the AI decisions, All of the Physics for each rendered frame have to be complete before object data can even be prepared for the rendering. Mind you I have a second screen (The OLED above my keyboard) thats been programmed to feedback gpu, cpu, ram usage, temperatures etc. Thats not the end all source of info but lets me keep tabs.

I do hit points where the graphics load is bad as well, but the machine runs Crysis and FC2 better than SR2. Render distance can be a gpu problem in both GTA 4 and SR2. But i found running SR2 at minimum settings made almost no difference in frame rates.

With the 360's use of a Modified DirectX9 Graphics API there should be alot more ports to PC. The PS3 however is a much more horrible story, I say that as a loving owner of one.

 

And this is part of the reason that I'm against buying laptops current quads right now unless there's a very good deal to be found. With SB, the quad cores become the better choice hands-down. It's worth waiting a month or two for.

 

I think SB is getting blown out of proportion a little bit just like when the Core i5 (Desktop) was supposed to blow away the original i7 lineup at lower speeds.

But i definitely think SB is worth the upgrade and I am "Waiting" for it. I don't intend to replace my laptop anytime soon but the current i7 was my next requirement and since SB will be out before I am even ready its on my list for sure.

Mind you the Dual vs Quad argument is several processor generations old now and im sure it will endure a few more. Personally my next desktop will have a minimum of 6 cores and it might get built next month.....

 

I would reduce the 8GB of RAM down to 4GB and go for the GTX 470M instead of the 460M. Then I would go for the cheapest CPU. The only game currently that really needs a Quad Core is GTA IV and that is only because it is very poorly optimised.

These sort of threads always talk about CPU speed as if it is the most important factor in gaming and few have mentioned GPU dependency. You can get the highest clocked CPU, but in a GPU dependent game, it won't give you any more significant advantage over a cheaper slower CPU as long as the CPU is at a reasonable clock rate.

So if you want to be able to play GTA IV at decent settings go for the Quad, if you don't care about GTA IV, go for the Dual. People have been mentioning the future proof Quad Core for years now and I see absolutely nothing that a Dual Core can't deal with in gaming other than GTA IV.

Battlefield 2 when first released used to be another example that needed a Quad but that changed pretty quickly and is no longer the case.

 

I just don't feel that the current quads were really fit to be mobile processors. The clock speeds should not have needed to be lowered so drastically.

Well, with dual cores in the process of being phased out, I don't think it will last much longer. Plus, quads have caught up in terms of clock speed, so the only advantage duals still have is lower power consumption.

 

I am sure they're are plenty of examples out there that overclock well. But the more cores you have the less likely they will all clock to the same speed. Not sure if Intel had bad results in early testing for core binning or if they're just being overcautious. I don't believe they were holding back in hopes to extend the lifespan of the product. Remember the more cores thrown out entirely the less the profit margin.

 

True, but the point is that SB doesn't even remotely have those issues and probably overclocks just as well, if not better. Even then, the C2Qs often overclock better than current i7s on laptops.

 

Well, SB will likely not have those issues since they are on the 32nm node, compared current i7 quads (all of them - no exception) are on the 45nm node. The larger, more power hungry process is what killed off the original Phenom units, and the smaller process allowed the Phenom II to do much better.