Is turbo boost worth it? comparing i3 370m vs i5 450m

Compare Intel® Products,

trying to decide which one to grab on the Envy 14.

$75 more for the 450m

main difference is turbo boost and a better integrated video card (which I don't think matters too much because if I'm ever using a video card for something that needs a vid card I'll be plugged in and using the radeon 5650 mobility)


Don't feel like spending $25 and getting the 430m. seems like a step down almost (sure it's faster than the 370 with turbo boost, but that's it)

 

If you want a bit better battery life and will only be doing basic tasks like Word, Excel, web surfing, etc. then you will be fine with the 370M

 

biggest most processor intensive thing I'd be doing would be a some video re-encoding and pscx2 playing.


I'm probably just gonna wait on some sort of hp coupon anyway so this is a moot point.

 

So 370M also has that 4.8 GT/s DMI, and along with 2.4 GHz clock speed. This really renders i5 430M somewhat pointless. Looking at recent gaming benchmarks I'm not that thrilled with improvements coming from turbo boost.

The turbo boost on i5 450M is only 2.66 GHz though (not 2.93 like i5 520M), and integrated graphics frequency @ 766 MHz instead of 667 MHz, which as you said is also a moot point since if you are going to run something graphics intensive you would have 5650 enabled anyway. I'm sure even the 667 MHz graphics in i3 would have no issue playing HD movies.

 

Just take the Intel Mobile i3 370m.
It should perform like a champ for you.

 

$75? I'd get the i5.

 

I would def go with the i5 for only 75 more dollars you'll get better integrated performance when you are on the go conserving battery. You'll get faster start up time with windows cause turbo will activate and applications will be snappier with the turbo too. It's only 75 dollars you could either get a bigger hdd or a faster proc. Proc is much harder to upgrade at a later date. Scale back your hdd or ram which are easily accessed and upgraded later when you save money down the road. To upgrade the processor you got to take apart the whole laptop much harder to upgrade down the road. Do yourself a favor and go for the fastest processor now and get cheaper ram or hdd.

Also people seem to think turbo mode is just when it switches to 1 core but thats not true. Turbo mode can also activate during dual core operation and will take the 2.4 speed to 2.53ghz for 2 cores as long as temps are in check. A laptop cooler such as the zalmon would be a good upgrade to make sure the cpu stays cool enough to turbo on 2 cores 90% of the time which will give you a 2.53ghz dual core vs a 2.4ghz dual core of the i3.

 

^^^ It turbo's up to 2.66GHz from 2.4GHz and the gpu speed is slightly faster. For the OP it is no worth it at all.

 

how accurate do you think this benchmark is?

PassMark CPU Lookup

it lists the i5 450m above the i5 540m (by a point) and the 520m by about 70 points.


'course the benchmark graph/score list doesn't really tell us what it checks. just that it uses the company's benchmark program.

 

Most gaming benchmarks generally show barely any improvement from faster CPUs, so I'm not sure what you mean. Could you link me to some benchmarks with and without Turbo on laptop CPUs? Desktop CPUs behave differently.

Actually, both the i5-430M and the i5-450M have +2/+2 boost, i.e. +266MHz on both one and two cores; this means the i5-430M and i5-450M will, under load, run at 2.533GHz and 2.667GHz respectively, except when limitations on heat and power consumption kick in. However, with full Turbo Boost, the i5-430M is only ~5.6% faster and the i5-450M is only ~11.1% faster, while both are ~15% faster on the integrated graphics. If you ask me, $75 is too much to pay for the i5-450M upgrade; it's just not enough of a difference for the extra cost. The i5-430M for $25 isn't bad, though.

For reference, I have a Core i5-430M in an MSI GX640 and I find that under most loads it keeps its full turbo of 2.53GHz. However, I found that running wPrime could drop it slightly, to ~2.5GHz on average, and Prime95 could drop it as low as 2.44Ghz or so - still faster than the i5-370M. On the other hand, while gaming on a hot day Turbo Boost turned off at one point, but this is mostly because of heat coming from the GPU, which shares heatpipes with the CPU in the GX640. The first example shows that the i5-430M can reduce its turbo boost slightly to regulate its power consumption down (some might call Prime95 a "power virus", after all), while the second is completely typical of any CPU's behaviour at high temperatures.

 

anyone else have any info regarding this?

 

i would get the 450m but seriously , see if there's a 520m or something... but even 430m will be bettter due to hyperthreading and extra cache.

 

I would be tempted to get the 450m since it's only $50 on the envy now. Although 520m would be even better. pcsx2 hits the cpu pretty hard and raw clockspeed is the biggest factor in framerates (going from dual to quad core doesn't really help that much).

 

All the i series cores have hyperthreading, even the i3.

 

Turbo boost is where its at. In single threaded games it makes a difference. Although for most games more CPU doesn't equate to a ton more frames, dropping below the recommended (which will happen sooner with the i3) reduces frames severely..I can attest to this, until very recently I've been using a T5750, and even with a 4650m, SC2 eats me during ANY physics...

 

Beyond synthetic benchmarks and seat of the pants feels-good anecdotes, I haven't seen any real-world numbers published by the game programmers or for that matter people like Adobe or Autodesk that say anything about Turbo Boost being a Good Thing.

TB certainly isn't a Bad Thing, but does it really do anything for real users in the real world??

If the numbers are out there, fine. But don't buy Turbo Boost based on benchmarks alone. Without Turbo Boost there is little to no difference between similarly clocked i3 and i5 chips.

You might be better off not spending the money at all or spending the money on more ram, a faster GPU, or a faster disk drive.

Very few machines are bottlenecked at the cpu. Most/all machines are bottlenecked at the gpu or hdd.

 

If you want to be future-proof get the i5...

 

when'd this get bumped back up?


anyway I grabbed the 520m.

 

I got the 520m too, magusdraco what made you made you go from deciding between the 370 and 450 then ultimately choosing the 520?

 

sorry always forget that but 520m is great...

 

*shrugs*

a hope that it'll work better in pscx2 than the 450m?


well that and I didn't feel like canceling my order (I made it on the 27th)

 

it should but i would get a i7 quad at least to play Pscx 2...

 

Why? Does PCSX2 even utilize the additional cores of an i7 (how many threads does PCSX2 use)? And if so, how well does it use them? I'm not thinking that it will make much of a difference at all - almost certainly not discernible.

 

actually it does since this is a multi core program.... extra cores help a lot...

 

I don't know where you are getting your sources from, but PCSX2 does not support more than 2 cores and it's not going to change any time soon. Ideally you should have a cpu that is overclocked up to 3.5-4ghz. So you should be getting the i7 for the higher clock speed, not the extra cores.

Do you think that PCSX2 team will implement quad core support?

Maybe I am wrong, but could you send me some sources showing how PCSX2 will benefit from quad core?

 

i'm quite sure that a guy here with a i7-820qm had more fps than a i7-620m guy in the emulator.. can't remember the name.. look at the old threads in the software and gaming forum on PCSX2..

 

Is the motherboard used for the core i3 the same as the ones used with the corei5?

I'm trying to keep the price of the Envy 14 within my range, which is $1250. This was easy until the jacked the price of the Radiance screen to $300.

So now I'm thinking of going with the core i3, instead of the i5 450, and then later (if possible) upgrading it to the i5 540 that they offer in the dv5tse. Obviously, I'd be buying the processor from somewhere like NewEgg or even eBay.

What I'll be doing on the laptop:
web surfing, programming (Visual Studio 210, NetBeans, Eclipse), watching movies/shows(HD an non), and some gaming (guessing the 5650 is going to be more the limiting factor than the speed difference between the i3 370 and i5 450).

I'm pretty confident the i3-370 will handle this just as well as the i5-450. Then in a year or so, if I want, I could throw in an i5 (preferably the 540 if it'll work with the i3 mobo).

Opinions?

 

the i3 and i5 motherboards will be the same.. the i7 one will be different.. so get the i3 if u want to.