Why the Core i7 may not be a good enthusiast processor

Wow, i know very few people who game on pure battery life. SpeedStep is for when the computer is idle, or for normal everyday work. There is marginal difference in battery life when you are running a T7700 at 2.8GHz than if you were running it at stock speed, even in gaming.

 

Personally I find my laptop, T6500, more than ample for everyday tasks without overclocking it. I can FSB overclock by 10% without stability issues but I have no need. So why take the chance with it?

I mainly am intereseted in the iX mobile series of CPU for the thin and lights. The UL30 series with an i7 over the SU7300 may become my new ultraportable. I'd have to wait a bit though as 11.6" notebooks may show up with i3's or i5's that may make sence as well.

Also on topic, an enthusiast does not have to be an overclocker but usually overclockers are enthusiasts..........

 

Yes, it does matter because whatever OCing you do accomplish is due to the thermal design of the laptop. Whenever designing a cooling system, presumably most manufacturers leave some extra cooling capability in order to keep the system stable in high ambient temps, dusty, or high-stress situations. The fact is that this "buffer" envelope is frequently neglected by most manufacturers. You think that, in order to accommodate safe and stable overclocking, a manufacturer wouldn't design the system any differently? Of course they do! That's what engineers are for!

Like Risco, I'm not saying that you can't overclock. I'm saying that:
a) laptops are not designed with overclocking in mind
b) laptop thermal designs frequently have little or no buffer in terms of extra cooling capacity
c) overclocking is possible, but is frequently problematic

I've seen plenty of people who OC their laptops, but NBR's users are rare animals in the ecosystem of computer users, and furthermore their OCs are frequently quite small. Everyone will readily admit that, for safe and significant-impact OCing, desktops reign supreme. Personally I have taken my C2D E6750 with G0 stepping from the stock 2.66GHz up to 4GHz easily with air-cooling.

 

Exactly what I was pointing at, and Ill agree 100% that comparing them clock for clock is not a good comparison. I was merely referring to cores only (not clock speed), and while the features of the new core i are neat, I still would prefer to have all 4 cores running. Granted I KNow this will kill my single threaded performance, but then again I do many things and not one serious single threaded app so either c2d or core i will work fine for me.

While you make some very valid points, its not just the "house keeping" Im referring to. I'm an avid multi-tasker and instead of needing strong single or dual threaded computing power I need to be able to spread my work over many cores/threads. Now I know for what I do either architecture will work perfectly fine for me, I just wish there was a way to shut off certain boost features. Either way Ill be using a c2d for a while.

 

although i dont do it myself, like most things in lfe, whether or not someone should overclock his/her laptop is a personal choice.
sure the desktop is abetter system for overclocking- heck its a better system for almost everything. its almost like saying you shouldnt game, photo edit, video convert, sound edit, or do cad work on a laptop since the desktop is the more powerful system.
also, there are certain laptop makes and brands that have changeable/swappable parts that are indeed catered to enthusiasts. and although parts in genral are more expensive for laptops, they can be replaced i th right system, with the right knowhow.
and as for the enthusiast himself, im sure they know full well how to test the performance-o/c limits of their laptops. and again, whether they go past this limit, and suffer the consequences(which they fully understand), is their own personal choice.
lastly, the comment seems offtopic, and if you wish to further express you opinions, your free to do so of course, but maybe in another thread.

just my two bits

 

and this is 100% true except if you need to be able to do this on a portable system. that means, a system that you take with you quite often, use at different places, has to run on battery, etc.

having a laptop to have it stand on a table at home is absolutely ridiculous and stupid in EVERY way. a small one just for at home, that's fine. why? because you can take it into bed, use it on the couch, even in kitchen. so you have local portability. but some 17" or so that just is on the "homeoffice desk" is simply a bad choice of device. nothing else.

if i wanted a fast gaming machine (which i don't personally care about), i'd get a desktop, and a huge screen to play on. much more bang for the buck. MUCH more.

 

also 100% percent true except that some people like myself move around a lot. battery is not so important to me as the places where i travel to have sockets all the same.
if i just wanna check my email, chat, or check a website or two, i can do that on my phone.
but when i want to gae, watch movies, trade, fiddle with my grpahs, update my work files, edit a video, and so much much more i will use my laptop connected to a power supply. ill do this in the office, in house, in my condo, in a cafe, in the mall, in my friends house, etc.
portability does not only mean using your laptop on batteries, man.
but you are right in saying that if your laptop just sits in your desk at home , it totally defeats the reason for getting one.

 

oops i think i misread you first paragraph dave, my bad.

 

no problem

i fixed the "gaming outside problem" for me: at the location i visit mostly when going outside, i motivated the people to build up a small lancenter for gaming

so now there are since over 2 years nice quadcores, geforce 8800, all at the price of about a single such laptop back then (6 machines)..



oh, and for everything else, a 12" ultraportable laptop performs good enough it just doesn't have a gaming-capable gpu... (i guess it could run quake3 )

 

that would be feasible if you were basically shuttling between two places like your home and office. but if your constantly moving around that would be impossible.

and gaming is not the only thing that need powerful systems. my GF who is an architect is always fuzzing over my sager and may get one since it will allow her to do CAD work on the move. my filmaker friend gets super highend laptops too so he can edit on the move. of course he has a powerhouse desktop at home but he moves around in different locations a lot.
so there are many applications where a 12" ultraportable may not be suited in fact.

but going back on topic, one of the reasons i 'support' overclocking in laptops is because if there are enough people interested in this, it may push some laptop makers to make more enthusiast models that will be much easier to upgrade/replace parts. with enough support we could actually have laptops that are as easy to upgrade as desktops in the near future. i believe it can be easily done, but laptop makers are loathe to doin this since they cannot push as many new models as often. but thats a topic for another thread....

 

Now forget i7, I like the sound of that.

 

you might be happy know that he uses a final cut pro for his desktop ; and some wierd linux based video editing suite for his laptop.

 

sure. the idea i wanted to show is: fit your needs the best way possible. that sometimes means thinking outside the borders of marketing, investing in the stuff really important.
my pc for music production got "reduced" now from a quadcore to an i5, as it fits my workload better (lots of single-threaded jobs). and i have no gpu in it anymore, as the i5 gpu is enough. no need to game on that machine. the result, a <90W desktop powered completely passive with a micropsu, and an intel ssd. cost: 500$

[quote
and gaming is not the only thing that need powerful systems. my GF who is an architect is always fuzzing over my sager and may get one since it will allow her to do CAD work on the move.[/quote]
no need for a big highend system to get fast cad. again, find out what's important. focus only on that.

again, testing exactly what's needed is important.

interestingly, it could fit those two noted quite well.. not as well as others, but quite well. the added flexibility of having it easily portable in one hand lets one apply it to much more tasks. so even while less powerful, it will give more usability in the end. but as always, find the needs, apply a solution to them.

well, it got enough buzz to make intel consider implementing it in a save and supportable way in their hw. see i7 which is why there's no need to further overclock it..

 

i agree with all your points dave except the ultra portable 12" one.
video editing and cad are notorious system hogs. afaik there isnt a 12incher with the combined cpu/gpu power to make this feasible on batteries atm.
maybe a 12incher for stock trading and light photoshop perhaps.
but were going way off topic here

 

well, different experiences then mainly .. i've seen high end systems performing badly at such tasks, and low end systems performing great..

but of course, for hd-editing in any form, i'd like a >hd screen. then again, how many laptops have >1920x1080? esp. at 12"

 

different strokes for different folks. thats what i love about the pc.

wait but what is your stand on whether the i7 is a good enthusiats cpu pr not?
(and not whether enthusiasts should oc a laptop ok )

 

Completely OT, but he probably uses Cinelerra. It's a nice system if you have the horsepower to run it.

 

i7 is a great enthusiast cpu as said before. why? because an enthusiast want a system that works in all sort of circumstances well. deliver great batterylife when not doing anything, delivering great performance on all sort of workloads (singlethread, multithreaded), and esp. being one thing: responsive all the time.

an enthusiast can't stand clicking something and having a delay, then.

an i7 delivers all that (esp. together with an ssd) an a never experienced way.

i don't personally think enthusiasts are overclockerfreaks all of them. that got trendy because systems couldn't deliver out of stock. i know enthusiasts that downclock, some that overclock, some that mod around, etc.

all they have in common is they want the best hw that adapts to their needs.

and, for most of the situations, an i5 or i7 is exactly that.


oh, and no enthusiast would ever buy old stuff

 

nicely said.
but i think vicous was referring to the overclockability of the i7.
maybe the title is a little misleading for some.
maybe it should read "why the i7 may not be so overclockable"

oh btw, nice music dave

 

yeah, the real question is, why is it so important to have it to be overclockable manually? the i7 could not get overclocked manually to similar performance in the same termal envelope than it does now by manually overclocking and measuring each core's temperature.

it's not really the title that's missleading. it's the old habbit of "having to overclock to be a cool geek" that is missleading. like tweaking the os till it's castrated down to nothing.

thanks. most of the music got birth on a 12" ultraportable *smile* ^^ /runsaway

 

the socket 1366 i7s dont have single core turbo boost. the i7 920 only boosts by one multiplier and it doesnt differentiate between single, dual or quad cores. but i have it overclocked at 3.8Ghz all day everyday so turbo boost is irrelevent.

the newer i7 and i5s in the socked 1156 have turbo boosts. but i suppose you would have to turn it off if you were overclocking via the BLK. Which make having turbo boost in these processors useless.

 

yep, 1156 based ones are the discussion in here actually, i guess (as they're new and raised that discussion).

well, why overclock it if you get the same speed without overclocking? that's the real question. but i guess it's just user dependent

 

There is no overclocking available in the D900F.

 

Yeah. Halleluah brothers We should thx Intel for bringing us such a great processor which fill up all ours needs. And really thx for taking those ability to overclocking. Who knows what some weirdo could do with that maby even ... overclock something and have fun or take pleasure from that or who knows what kind of other deviation. If something was't design with oc abilities it should not be overclock- thats the one and only truth.!!! And one more thing If You really wanne feel cool You should start doing something normal and proper like painting, doing crochet or making music.
Yeah
What i wanne say is that for some peoples and they needs the new i7 and i5 aren;'t such great solution. They are great cpu for other 90 or 95% peoples.And here for me should be end. What I don't understand (maybe only i feel it like this) is that one ppl wanne discredit others and there poin of view. We are differend and we have different needs and besides I just hate when someone tells me that something should be like this or like that. Peace brothers

 

Notebook users usually aren't interested in quad core super powered laptops that happen to weigh 17 pounds and boast 18.4 inch screens.
Your solution would be getting a desktop computer. More powerful for same class. (desktop i7 is much more powerful than mobile i7.)

 

are u 100% sure? It does have a desktop chipset and all.... hasn't anyone overclocked the processor on it using setfsb or something?

 

it can be overclocked, and he did it on an i7


http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=398080

 

I have a stable 4GHz OC on all cores (.8GHz higher than a single core turbo boost on the i5 750) completely stable, 60c max in any stress test you can find (IBT/P95/LinX/Orthos etc, with a 15$ after market cooler. so yea...I'd say that OCing is still worthwhile.

 

What do you know lol, I miss my 18.4" monster, I miss being able to encode a video while I am at work and listen to music at the same time. I cant always be home on my desktop. Infact I get a lot more time and work done with my laptop than I do my desktop.

You didnt read the thread title you totally missed the part where I said "enthusiast" I already filtered the other 95% of people that just want a normal laptop for normal stuff. We should only be debating and talking about those of us who ARE concerned and interested in the concept of overclocking and portable powerhouses.

 

The Socket 1366 i7's can do +1 bin for 2/3/4 cores and +2 bin for 1 core.

 

depending on the situation and needs, of course. but being here in a laptop forum, i don't see that much need for it (as i stated before, lots of people have laptops without using them as such, so they wasted money anyways, which could have been invested in a much better system instead).

 

hes actually talking about his desktop

 

Im finding other issues with the i7 of late that are not just the overclocking. It seems it causes compatability issues with the hyperthreading. Race Driver Grid flat out refuses to run with the i7 due to the hyperthreading. I found a fix by changing the 8 thread xml file to the 4 thread xml file. The game runs... but not correctly I get sudden boosts of super real time speed at random for a second that makes racing impossible.

I have to experiment with the game more to see if I can fix it by changing some other settings.

Also the i7 is only getting close to the power of my old core2quad when using all 8 threads. This means if you have a multi threaded application that breaks down the data into uneven segments (a real life example should be supreme commander it will create threads for as many cores as your cpu has but only 2 of the threads are heavy the rest almost do not help) the cpu will not have but about 1/2 of the power to process in each of those threads so it will be a lot slower than the 4 core quad core without hyper threading. It would be on par if it had the same clock speed but they have dramatically cut clock speed on the i7.

 

ive actually played grid with my setup and its performing excellently actually.
its actually one of the best games to look at and i like playing it except that i suck at it.
also i see all my cores performing at almost the same level when doin video editing/transcoding. in fact the virtual cores seem to be working as hard as the physical cores even. ill post a screenshot here.
have you tried monitoring your temps? ur using a g73 right? what is the the power draw of your 5870 and whats the rating of the psu? could it be providing too little power as per the probelm with the AW m17x throttle issue?

 

The G73's use 150W PSU's while our W8x0CU's use 120W PSU's. The MR 5870 has a TDP of 50W.

 

whats the tdp of a 280m almost the same?

 

The TDP of the GTX 280M is 75W, 50% higher than the MR 5870 on paper.

 

no temp issues, and no power issues I have tested both. Its right on the forums for grid the game being stuck in a "loading forever" state due to hyper threading. I am not sure how you got your game to start without implementing the fix, maybe an update fixes it I was on the stock install benchmarking for my review.

I'll update my game and see if that fixes it. If there is an update lol.

 

yeah! i was just gonna edit my post
55 versus 40 nm technology.

what are your temps vicious?

maybe so. mines purchased from steam and is set to auto update.
i also know there was an update fairly recently...

disregard my previous post...

 

Idle Temp 45c Power Draw 60w
100% load 8 threads Temp 65c Power Draw 95w

Power Adapter is 150w
TJ Max is 100c

 

i just tried it on cinebench 11.5 and all 8 cores were at 100%
could it be that the program your using is not yet optimized for 4+ multithreading ie old grid, more than a defficiency in the i7's?

 

Yeah its the programs fault not the cpu, just stating that with the new tech can come new problems. It was a rough move when quad core first game out in the same manor.

 

Regarding dynamic clock rates of the mobile i7, through benhmarking Fsx on my laptop that has the Intel®Core i7-820QM I decided to experiment with Core affinity.

I found that setting affinity to a certain number of Cores improved / decreased performance which is to be expected. Then I came across this free tool Bill2's Process Manager 3.4.1.3

The idea was that instead of relying on Turbo Boost, I could disable all Cores apart from 1 to force a higher clock rate. I haven't been able to verify this behaviour yet but performance increases were observed in games where I forced two Cores through affinity but it could just be due to Turbo boosts wrong decisions.

Apparently you can also disable Hyper Threading with that freeware as well. If anyone knows of any other similar freeware that works on Windows 7, please let me know.

Try this program to disable the virtual Cores for that process Bill2's Process Manager 3.4.1.3

 

nice find
have you tested it extensively already

 

vicious , how are GPU and CPU temps in games in the G73?

 

Temps are nice and low on the G73 no problems.

 

I haven't tested it extensively but it seemed to work fine with no crashes or issues. It is good to see that we have the option of disabling logical and physical cores in an easy to use and clear interface.

 

good indeed and something for vicous to work on

 

Its seems the OPs actual problem is his choice of manufacturer. for his toy.

The lack of available overclocking options is not entirely the fault of the cpu or its embedded features, but support from the installed bios.

It is not suprising that the lower clocked i7-720qm is outperformed by a higher clocked Q9000. Most reviews reflect this.

My stock Q6600 desktop does very well compared to an i5-750 for example.
Clock for clock, less than really 5-10%.

The Clarksfield/Nehalem 'processing' architechure is not that far advanced compared to the Core2 series bar HT.

Most of it is memory controllers, pci lanes..etc. The massive additional L3 cache costs extra watts, and the additional power gating is a matter of negating the additional power drain- and gives us a cool individual core overclock feature for poorly written apps.

Often not mentioned is the lack of a real northbridge now with the use of the new design cpus. The lack of TDP output / power consumption of the old external controller offsets the extra power consumption of the new cpus.

Built in GPUs is another way to remove power hungry external silicon.

Granted Intel has 'only' initially offered these cpus with a lower base clock speed- probably to again optimise overall power consumption, but to argue they are slower is unfair.

Clock for clock is meaningless comparing a P4 to a Core2, but is more relevant with Core2 vs i5/i7 since they are more similar than they are different in their actual core processor implementation.

It may be a shame your chosen laptop model has limited bios options to make your OCing life easier- To bring your proverty spec cpu up to a higher class.

But perhaps you choice of a better cpu would have made your happier. eg a 820qm, with higher TB bining. 1/1/6/9 (720qm) vs 2/2/8/10 (820qm) and more l3.

While its always been possible to make a $200 cpu into a $800 one by overclocking- its only been possible when a bios option permits it. FSB or otherwise.

When deciding my laptop- I did this knowing I could bolt in a faster chip if I felt the need. And did. T9500 va T5450.

I didn't sit complaining why a 1.6Ghz chip couldn't match a 2Ghz chip (even if the 1.6Gig chip was a SLIGHTLY newer generation). Its freaking obvious.

Blame your vendor not intel.

 

Could u be more specific plz? Like what ranges... Also any other problems like BSOD's or driver issues?

P.S : sorry for hijacking the thread lol..