Intel i5 3320M or i7 3632QM?

I'm getting the HP Envy dv6t-7000 select edition. The higher end processors I can choose from are the i5 3320M @ 2.6 Ghz 2 core and the i7 3632QM at 2.2 Ghz 4 core. First, will this choice affect battery life significantly? Second, which is better performance wise? Generally i7>i5, but the i5 has a faster clock speed than the i7.

 

What are you planning to do with your computer? For anything CPU heavy (e.g. gaming, photo/video editing, 3D rendering etc.) the i7 will be faster. But if you're just going to browse the internet and watch videos or something, the i5 is the better value.

 

To add to R3d's post, if your computer is sitting idle most of the time, power consumption differences will be pretty much the same (TDP is the max power usage, but the CPU won't run at full capacity all the time unless you're running some very heavy applications).

If you fill out the sticky in the What Notebook Should I Buy Forum and make a thread there, we can help you find a laptop and specs, or just the specs if you're dead-set on the HP Envy dv6t-7000 (there are other good competitors to that laptop, so it's good to shop around).

 

The i7 will drain the battery more during load, but that also depends on how much load. As Kuroi-Tsubasa mentioned, at idle, it will make little to no difference on battery life. Now, as far as performance goes, the i5 is a solid processor, but there are games/programs that are more CPU dependent when it comes to resource utilization. Some games are more demanding on the GPU, some take more from the CPU.

With that being said, the i7 is nearly always the better CPU choice, but if it were strictly a budget decision and you weren't planning on putting heavy load on either CPU, then the i5 is a very good processor and easy to recommend.

 

Other than the number of cores and the frequencies, these two processors are essentially the same. i7 and i5 designations are mostly for marketing purposes. The quad core will be better for heavily multithreaded applications and the dual core for things that are less multithreaded. Overall there is not a huge difference unless you're doing things like encoding video that benefit from all that processing power. Some games will run slightly faster on one and others faster on the other. Overall though both are powerful enough to drive any notebook GPU without ever being the bottleneck.

I personally, would (And did) buy the quad core but if price is important there isn't much reason not to buy the less expensive one.

 

1). Always buy as much compute power as you can afford (don't go into debt for it...).

2). If you're buying for less than a year; buy the i5 - if you want the machine to last as long as possible (i.e. you don't know when the next upgrade will be) buy the i7/see step one.


Both of these cpu's will throttle any high end gpu you can put into a mobile system: don't under power your setup.

As for battery power... as stated above, the i7 will match and in my experience even beat the i5 in idle/low duty usage (because, I think more cores can effectively run at the lowest speed-step and still get the needed work done).

The best way to think of the battery power is for a fixed amount of work: the quad core will always be better/more efficient than a dual core (remember both are 35W TDP and it too can turbo up to within 0.1GHz of the dual core, but with double the cores and double the L3 Cache).

So for the same amount of battery life; you'll get more work done (more productivity) with the quad core - but potentially shorter absolute battery life (for the same workload).

If you just want to have the system on/idle all day, then maybe the i5 will be better suited for you (because you obviously don't need the horsepower).


Final advice at the beginning of 2013? Get Windows 8 x64 Pro, Get a quad core i7 and get 16GB of RAM or more and get yourself an SSD. All of these 'gets' will increase your system performance greatly, while barely affecting battery life (at idle) at all.

See: http://ark.intel.com/compare/64896,71670

See:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-3320M+@+2.60GHz

See:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-3632QM+@+2.20GHz

Good luck.

 

found another thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...es/638949-i5-dual-core-vs-i7-quad-core-3.html

I'm a bit confused regarding the battery life, as some folks in that thread say the i5 dual has a lower power consumption.

Wouldn't that be true for at least idle or small load considering the simple fact that twice the cores are running (even though at different frequencies)

Are there any test regarding power consumption?

 

The clock speeds you are talking about are the base clock speeds. (without the intel turbo technology). The max clock speeds of both processors are i5 3.3GU`Hz and the i7 3.2GZh. So not too much difference there.

As said above the i7QM will be faster (at least in most programs)