Which is the bottleneck?

For gaming/normal use which would be the bottle neck.

the i7-620M or the ATI Mob. 5850?

Might be a hard question since you could have a lot of factors, basically which one would become obselete faster?

 

They'll probably age equally?

Perhaps you could complain that the CPU is only a dual-core.

 

For gaming, the GPU is bottleneck,though some new games are demanding more CPU power.

For normal use, neither.

 

They are pretty well evenly matched, with the GPU being the bottlleneck most of the time, if anything. The graphics card will "age" faster though, as graphics power has been growing at a much faster rate than processor power for years now.

 

It's actually the opposite way.
You don't have new GPUs every six months, unless you're someone like Nvidia who would just overclock the card, give it a different name and call it "new"

 

No, it's not the opposite way. Each new generation of graphics cards is leaps and bounds greater than the generation before it. To test this you can run an older game on modern hardware and see that it will be CPU limited even if you have an i7 at 4Ghz.

 

How long do you think it is until quad core is mainstream on notebooks? I could get the 720qm instead but the 620m is better for the battery which not really a sacrifice in performance

 

Off the top of my head I think it is towards the end of next year.

 

ugh... hmm the 620m vs 720qm question is killing me...
How easy is it to upgrade a CPU later on? (although I would really rather not have to)

 

That depends on the laptop. On my Dell Inspiron 15 it is really easy. You just have to unscrew a panel and unscrew the heatsink. On my Dell Studio 15 you have to disassemble the entire laptop to reach the CPU.

 

Or 820qm, faster than both.

 

Well the 720qm vs 620m debate exists because of how close they are in price

 

If the laptop has no TPM or hybrid GPU, I would pick 720qm. It has slightly higher memory bandwidth and multithread performance.

 

2011 when Intel releases 22nm Ivy Bridge.

 

New question then, when the quad cores on laptops become mainstream, will the 720qm be obselete then?

 

I guess next year's CES.

 

i think mobility 5850 will be bottleneck in games if it has DDR3 memory... if it has GDDR5 memory, then there i no bottleneck... For CPU , i'd get i7 quad anytime... its quite fast and especially in multi threaded apps...

 

But is it a big power hog over the 620M at low to medium load?

 

No it won't be "obsolete", to Intel, every new generation makes the last "obsolete", but in real world performance, commonly the last generation or architecture usually delivers on par performance for more than a couple years.

 

Here is a few threads that could help you decide.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=455347

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=450403

 

There's no such thing as "no bottleneck". At a certain point, given a certain task, one part will end up not yielding as much as the other and will constitute a bottleneck. Just because performance is not affected does not mean a bottleneck is not present.

That being said, I agree that there isn't any performance breaking bottleneck present.

 

Thanks, I've read through those threads. I don't know... I think I'm just being dazzled by ooooooooooooo 4 cores but I'm afraid that applications might start optimizing for quads and then the 2 cores in the 620M just don't compete as well...

 

620 and 720 are pretty much equal,

Number of cores has no effect

Odds are the 620 can occasionally perform better

Parallel threading doesn't exist for these lovely laptop CPU's yet (I dont think).

One could say the allocation of 2 cores could complete tasks faster then the allocation of 4 cores, since they don't run along side each other, one could possibly lag the others behind,

I'd agree with "There is no bottleneck"

The system will scale with its time fine, as the system ages, the settings reduce, less load on the GPU, don't know about the CPU,

620 is cooler? I don't think it uses same amount of power at top load.

 

People are saying all sorts of things about eh power consumption of each one. Under low load which one draws less power? Has anyone tested that properly?

I'm going to be using this laptop for 2-3 years. By that time will I be crying at how slow my machine has become in comparison to what is mainstream then?

 

i would get the i7 quad... it would be quite fast and in 2-3 years when quads become standard , it will still be fast and not "obsolete" like dual cores then... now as far as GPU , 5850 with GDDR5 is great for playing games at full HD res... however with DDR3 , don't expect it to play games on high on any other res than 1366X 768... if u give us more info on what laptop ur planning to buy , it would help.

 

GX640, should have GDDR5. I don't mind playing games in the future on medium. Maybe I'll just say screw battery life grab a GX740 and upgrade to a 820QM... although I was really hoping I could get a good semi portable laptop

 

GX640's 5850 is GDDR5. There's no need to debate this anymore.

The 620M + 5850 will compliment each other well.

Doesn't the 620M have two threads per core?

 

Dual vs quad doesn't mean much. In the future, the quad will not be any less or more obsolete than the dual just by being a quad core. The main difference is the processing power. The drive for parallelism isn't because it is better, it is because its is the easier way to increase processing power. Assuming the processing power per clockspeed remains the same between the dual and quad i7's (it is close enough), the 720QM is 1.6Ghz x 4 = 6.4 relative Ghz, and the 620M is 2.667Ghz x 2 = 5.334 relative Ghz. The dual has about 83% the processing power of the quad. Decide for yourself if that is good enough and between the other features of the processors, but don't base anything on being dual vs quad.

Yes, all the core i processors have hyperthreading. The impact it makes would be most noticeable in an application like a game.

 

On just about any system, the bottleneck will almost always be the disk drive, be it HDD or SSD.

Compared to HDD/SDD speeds, the rest of your system including the graphics chip, is pretty much capable of chewing through data at warp speed.

That being said, an SDD in real-world terms can be as much as 100x faster than an HDD on the same speed interface and with the same workload. The questions you need to ask yourself are a) is the 10x price per megabyte worth my $$$ and b) do I trust the projected (guesses!!) longevity and reliability figures for SDD.

We KNOW that a modern hard drive, even a laptop hard drive, can last 5+ years as long as you don't knock it around. On a mass market level, there is what, 6 months experience with SSD in a mobile (laptop) environment. And we're still looking at low-volume deployments of the tech. Call me back when 50% of the shipped laptops, including 'professional' models sold directly to Fortune 100 IT deparments, have SDDs installed.

If your HDD craps out and you REALLY need to get the data recovered, you can do so for about $1000 at any number of professional data recovery firms. If your SDD craps out, you have to send it to the manufacturer. The last quotes I've seen for SDD data recovery run from $5000 and up.

You pays your $$$ and you takes your chances. But knowing the potential risks (to balance out all the fanbois enthusiasm over new/great technology) lets you make an intelligent decision instead of an emotional one.

 

If someone wants to read...

Impact of cores on performance , on AMD Phenom II though but still...

Impact of TurboBoost and HyperThreading , on i7

 

Yep, the 5850 is definate GDDR5, confirmed by MSI and the review models.

Second, threads can't be called parallel at the minute, they just aren't, which makes two higher cores very efficient, ofc writing styles when it comes to programming can help that.

Low consumption, i'd imagine the dual would still be lower, but the quads low clock speed at max, mixed with the massive speed when its overclocked and at low power, this could mean the gap is pretty much negligable.

Hyperthreading offers up to 20% performance in some cases, and the new arcitecture is much more efficient then C2Q, i think its safe to say a 720m will eat a q9000, (Yep regardless of clock speed.)

I don't really know what the deal is with the i7-6** being on par with the 720, but its sure as hell a very good core.

Newsposters point is ub3r valid too, HDD will always matter .

 

Yea, I'm scared of SSD right now. Not enough testing for degradation has been done with them for me to use my one laptop per 3 year purchase on one. I'll stick with a 7200 rpm HDD for now.

so my main concerns are a gpu and cpu that wont make me want to kill myself everytime I try to run multiple applications.

Just to show you my pain my current laptop is:
T5500 @ 1.66Ghz and a Geforce Go 7600

safe to say...my current computing experience is not too pleasant

 

Its not bad, it does the job ok i'd imagine? still have my 1.83 t2400 + go 7600 living well.

7200rpm will be fine, i might pick up a 7k500 2.5" drive, they seem really good .

 

it does a good enough job just to web surf/msn but its running vista so it has some trouble and much difficulty with ms word

also i seem to never get an answer to which sucks up more juice at low load - 620 or 720

 

Haha, i shall make it my personal goal to get you just that.!

720 is 45mn
620 is 32mn

 

newb question, what does that mean exactly?

 

Nanometer

Basically i think this is the size of the transistors so the smaller means less heat generated, which can lead to longer CPU life (Or does it.) faster clock speeds, along with good overclocks of course, and less power consumption (Please if im wrong correct me people!.)

So i'd hazzard a guess and say the 620 IS cooler but i'm shifting through the info on the intel documents now, and i can't find idle states .

 

booooo, thanks for the help

hmmmm i dont know if anyone would ever run this, but have the exact same system and test each cpu and record battery life

 

Wow, you're using a T5500 and a Go 7600 and complaining... I until last year was using a T43 with a Pentium M 2GHz and an X300 and it was always a pleasant experience, also was multi booting XP Pro and Windows 7 RC, 7 worked fine, installed Office 2007 and no problems with opening it up.. very fast, from cold boot MS Word 2007 opens in about 2-3 seconds..

 

I don't understand, what are you trying to say?

The dual would be quite a bit lower because of its 32nm process and more advanced power saving technology. The new gulftown chips (6 core 32nm) are 50% more cores, and therefore processing power, yet use significantly less power, up to 50% less when idling, than bloomfield (4 core 45nm).

Yes, Nehalem is a little stronger clock for clock, but not by such a large margin. It is very unwise to think that a dual core nehalem at 2.66Ghz will "eat" a quad core core 2 quad 2Ghz. Also I was flipped when I said that hyperthreading gives the most benefit in games. Here is a benchmark of core i7's hyperthreading's effect on some benchmarks. It does well on the two non-game benchmarks, but actually hinders performance in games: http://vr-zone.com/articles/does-core-i7-hyper-threading-helps-/6160.html

 

I run multiple copies of server2008 in VirtualBox machines hosted by Windows 7 PRO/64 on my machine. And by running multiple copies I mean one VM running Oracle or DB2 serving a copy of Apache or IIS on the other server VM for customer demos feeding queries coming from their networks.

I've also used this clients/server/web setup to demo photo album pages for my side business.

This is all on an HP G70 laptop, T4200 cpu, 4 Gb ram, Intel 4500HD graphics.

Haven't killed myself or the machine yet.

 

How? The T4200 doesn't support virtualization.

 

VirtualBox neither requires or cares about virtualization.

None of the virtualization products require hardware VT although they will use it if available. Even the VirtualXP component of Win7 Pro+ has dropped their requirement for hardware VT.

 

I'm just saying it's crazy that you can run all that on a T4200! Especially since it lacks hardware virtualization acceleration.

 

what is crazy is all the people who say you need an i3/5/7 to run 'games'.

 

Just to nitpick slightly, he was talking about the 720QM quad core, not the 620M dual core, so it's actually 1.6 GHz quad core compared to a 2 GHz C2Q. Although, given benchmarks that seem to show that the 620M can beat the 720QM even in highly threaded applications, it still may be a proper comparison. The biggest advantage of the Q9000 is that many seem to be able to overclock it at this point.

 

Do you think people eventually figure out overclocking on the i7s besides the 9**?

 

I think eventually, yes. It's already started with machines like the Asus G73, (and I think the M17x-R2 can as well) and people have been overclocking the BLCK on desktop core i chips for a while now (check Anandtech for examples, if you like). I think as the chipsets and processors mature, overclocking will make it into the mobile sector. It's just early times, still, as yet, with an inherently different technology (moving the memory controllers onto the die has removed one of the main classic ways of overclocking, through the FSB).

 

IMO for the most part it isn't THAT much of an improved architecture, Intel wants you to think that, and from all the advertising, they make the i7 seem like the worlds best processor, and MILES above Core 2 Quads or Core 2 Duo's.

 

MSI would have been a great choice if it has a full HD screen... it really kills the purpose of having such a powerful GPU and not being able to fully utilize the power... That's why i would say get a Sager NP8690 , NP8790 , Asus G73 or if u are a real MSI die hard fan , get GX740... at least you will have a full HD screen.