i5-3210M vs i7-3612QM for my needs

Hey guys,

I have decided I am going to purchase the Sony Vaio Z, but I am debating which processor to get out of these two. The i7 is a $250 extra charge here in Canada, and I am wondering if I am going to need it. My main uses of this laptop are going to be watching movies, using it for NBA and NFL league pass (streaming videos in HD), doing excel based work, using other finance/accounting software(not very high intensive), and maybe gaming here and there (the new counter-strike will be the most graphics intensive game I'll be playing). Is getting the i7 really worth it for me, I've heard that when doing simple tasks, the i5 is actually faster than the i7, is this true?

Thanks.

 

Buy the i5 if you don't want to hardcore multitask/rendering videos/hardcore gaming.

 

The tasks you mention should not require more than the 3210M.

However, I'm not sure how much credibility is there to the statement " ...when doing simple tasks, the i5 is actually faster than the i7... "

 

There's a difference you'll notice in benchmarks, but it's nowhere near worth $250.

In short, the i5 is competitive or better than the i7 in lightly threaded (1-2 threads, aka your needs) tasks, and competitive or worse in heavily threaded (4+ threads). You will also find marginally better battery life in the i5 (perhaps 10-20m at most).

The i5 may outperform the i7 on some lightly threaded tasks just because of the clock differences (2.5GHz vs 2.1GHz when all cores are loaded). Things like watching videos are usually single-threaded, so you really won't make use out of more cores.

For recent games, the i7 will do better.
For older games, the two CPUs are similar, the i5 might perform a little better sometimes.

 

So, you're saying for my needs the i5 is definitely the more viable option? How about if I was to multi-task like watch an HD movie, do a virus scan, and have a lot of windows open at the same time? Would there be a performance difference in the i5 and i7 in this case?

 

Probably not. You should remember that having a lot of windows open is not necessarily a heavy workload on the CPU. It takes up a lot of memory. From your example, the movie and the virus scan would take up the CPU. The other windows that you mention would depend on what they are for.

Multithreading is not a very easy concept to understand or explain. In your example, you are not going to be running the virus scan in one thread, the movie in another. The virus scan software will most likely be written for multithreading so it will use all four cores. However, not 100% so you have room for other things. There is a lot of stuff involved in multithreading.

Simply put however, for the tasks that you have mentioned, the i5 should be sufficient.

Oh btw, again to restate, the i5 will NOT necessarily be better than the i7 for "lightly" threaded tasks. Both Turbo to over 3GHz and that is a pretty fast clock speed. Few single threaded tasks today are going to require that.

 

If you were in my position, what would you get?

 

Like I said, for the tasks you have mentioned, any non ULV i5 will do.

 

Get the i5, for your tasks nothing would perform better on the i7 that will warrant the $250 premium. Use that $250 and get a nice 256gb SSD instead. In the event you do find something that does benefit from the i7 (i.e. something that scales well on multiple cores), you probably can't run the thing for very long due to heat and throttling issues, the Vaio Z doesn't have that beefy of a cooling system anyway. Case example, My W110er is a subnotebook with an i7 quad Ivy, I can theoretically use it to churn through video renderings very quickly but the CPU spends most of its time at 90 degrees.
Multi tasking is a tricky thing, it depends you see but virus scans are quite happy running on one thread leaving the other core free for general use. HD videos are not that CPU intensive thanks to the superb video decoding unit inside the intel HD4000 GPU so you won't notice much over a quadcore. For your work, unless you deal with godly massive data sets you shouldn't notice a difference, you RAM speed and SSD would be more influential.

 

Okay, I just configured a Sony Z and easily hit over $2800 - with the highly NOT recommended RAID0 2x 128GB SSD option...

The price difference for the MUCH better processor is less than 10% of the total system cost - hardly worth giving up the 70%+ jump in performance.

Even if you don't need it now - how long are you thinking to keep the notebook? If you're going to buy something new in less than 18 months keep the inferior dual core - however, if you'll be hanging onto this for as long as possible; the quad core platform is the only thing worth considering in the last quarter of 2012 (no matter how little your current usage patterns will push it).

So, just to be clear: Sony Z, Quad Core i7, 8GB (or more; I would recommend 16GB for this platform; if 'balance' is important to you) RAM, Windows 7 PRO or Ultimate and at least a 256GB SSD (or two) but certainly not in RAID0 - (especially not in a proprietary RAID0 array like Sony or MSI is proposing...) - yeah this setup BEGS for a modern quad core cpu.

No matter if a circa 2006 dual core setup seems 'good enough' for your current computing needs.

See (Passmark: 3930):
PassMark - Intel Core i5-3210M @ 2.50GHz - Price performance comparison

See (Passmark: 6724):
PassMark - Intel Core i7-3612QM @ 2.10GHz - Price performance comparison


See:
ARK | Intel® Core

See:
ARK | Intel® Core


So, how long do you intend on keeping this system - and, how much $$$ have you configured it for to now?

Hope this helps.

Good luck.

 

maverick hit this pretty well. I'd get the i5.

You honestly won't notice a difference. If you want to burn $250, I'd sooner spend it on a nice SSD or something, as that will have a more tangible benefit. The i5 is plenty capable and will not bottleneck your system, even if you're multitasking. It's an extremely capable CPU, and you'll be hard pressed to find a significant benefit in an i7 outside of heavily multi-threaded benchmarks. Compare single or two-thread benchmarks and you'll find the two CPUs perform about the same.

 

On Power Notebooks.com, if you get the PowerPro notebook, and you upgrade from an i5 to an i7 3610, they give you a free IC Diamond Thermal Compound upgrade. It only cost me an extra $99 to upgrade the processor, minus the $35 the upgraded compound costs.

So yeah, I went with the i7.

 

I actually had no choice with mine, the retailer didn't even know you could purchase the i5s from intel until I bugged them, lo and behold, i5-3210m was available a month later.