Choosing either a Intel 5500 or 7200

Looking at a Lenovo T60 at the moment, and while they have a pretty cheap upgrade from the 5500 to 7200 processor, I am wondering if it is really worth the 50 bucks.

Does the 7200 have any speedstep enhancements to provide better battery life?

What is the % boost in performance between the 2 models?

Anyone have Super Pi averages for the 5500 and 7200?

 

SuperPi is a useless benchmark and does not translate to anything in real life, so don't base your decision off of that.

In order to help you decide between the two processors, we will need to know what you will be doing with this notebook.

The battery life for both processors will be almost identical. The 7200 will probably have a few minutes less. Speedstep is the same on both of them.

 

Well super pi is an easy benchmark to run across the board on my computers, and I can see decent gains across the board and somewhat put a "face" on the money I just spent on that system. It gives a good general idea for me on what sort of gains my system upgrade/replacements have given.

System use varies from watching movies, encoding ipod videos on the road, browsing the internet in an incredibly boring class, to doing work between classes. Battery life is a key part in my day to day work.

The power draw difference has to be a bit more than a few minutes. It has double the L2 cache, and also runs with a higher clock from a increased clock multiplier.

Problem I am seeing is no one seems to buy middle of the road laptops. You see people buying celeron models, or models with the fastest items across the board. Barely anything in between.

 

The processor normally runs at 1.0GHz though, due to SpeedStep. The difference in battery life will probably be negligable.

Your needs don't warrant getting the T7200, although $50 is very cheap to upgrade to it. If you encode a lot, you'll see a difference. Other than that, you won't.

 

+1 to Chaz's comments above. Aside from the video encoding you'll notice no difference between the two CPUs for the tasks you've listed. The video encoding could see up to a 25% improvement (based on comparisons of the two Macbook Pro revisions), since audio/video encoding is one of the applications that does take full advantage of the extended L2 cache.

The problem with SuperPI is that it's overly cache dependant, meaning that the improvement you'll see with 4MB vs. 2MB L2 cache is not representative of the overall performance increase between the two. FYI, T7200 vs. T2500 (both 2GHz) is around 15-20 seconds.