i7-3720qm vs i7-3520m or i5 - 3360m

I'm buying a Latitude E6530 from the Dell Outlet, and trying to find the right config. It will be used for basic Internet, CorelDraw, Office tasks, movies, light gaming, and some photo editing (not pro). I know I don't need a super high spec computer,
but want to keep it for a while so don't want to start off with something that'll feel too slow in 3 years.

Some configs have the i7-3720qm at 3.6GHz, others have the dual core i7-3520m 3.9GHz or i5 3.8GHz. Is the i7 quad at a lower clock speed going to feel much slower than the higher clock speed dual cores? I don't have a clue if Corel and PSE benefit much from a
quad, and don't want all the other aspects of use to suffer for two programs I will use in smaller proportion of the time.

 

Contrary to popular belief: there is no such thing as 'light computing' moving forward in 2013...

If you want your system to be usable in 3+ yrs: go with a quad core. Doesn't matter if you think (or others say) that you won't be using it fully right now.

For what, about $100 more? you'll get more than double the life out of it (or, if you don't - you can sell/give it to someone who will - in 2016+..).

Good luck.

 

So the number of cores is more important than base clock speed? Sorry for such a noob question ;-).

 

The base clock speed is what it is - but Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8 (and all programs and O/S's going forward) are more and optimized for many core operation.

A dual core cpu in 2013 forward is like having a classic BMW 2002 in the Swiss Alp twisties - the snow melts faster...


See:
BMW 2002 FAQ

 

I concur with tiller. Quad core all the way. Those speeds listed are max turbo speeds anyhow. Regular tasks the quad will run just as fast and anything multithreaded will run even faster. Quads idle at similar power consumption too, so shouldn't affect battery life any either.

 

The dual-core CPUs would've been preferably... Back in 2009-2010.

But now many of the newer games use more than dual-cores properly. Tom's Hardware delisted a dual-core IB Pentium and replaced it with a quad-core Althon, citing that newer games such as Far Cry 3 perform better on quads with weak single-thread performance than duals with better single-thread performance.

 

I take it IE and Firefox will benefit, or at least not be slower than a faster DC? I totally feel how my old home desktop that was once pretty fast, is now slow on everything because as hardware gets faster, programs and apps are written to take advantage of it.

 

The quads have a higher TDP so even when the CPU is only using 2 cores it has more power to play with and will turbo longer

 

Thanks everyone...one more piece of the puzzle in place

 

I agree the Core i7 quad-core makes sense if it's within economic reach. Take into account that your needs could change.

Intel brought the confusion about processor frequency on themselves when they pushed the Pentium 4 as 'better' because it ran at higher frequencies ...when all higher frequencies did for that unfortunate chip was cover up for design inefficiency (huge power requirements).

The microarchitecture of modern processors like the Core i5 (especially the 2nd/3rd gen) is efficient - they perform exponentially more operations per clock than previous CPUs. Therefore there's not a need for insanely high clockspeed (though high clockspeed isn't a bad thing).

 

So i5 could not be useable in 3 years ? By 2016, i am sure there is a much better value quad core than today's used quad core system..

@OP

yeah, go with the quad-core if you can afford. It is just faster and better, not necessarily the thing that can make your laptop not being slowed down. Talking about OS regular maintenance here and keeping your laptop in moderate temperature so lifetime of inside hardwares are not degraded fastly. They are not immortal stuff anyway

 

Any CPU is usable... But for obvious reasons, most informed gamers aren't using Pentium IIIs.

 

Dual cores pretty much lost their edge when the Ivy Bridge quadcores could boost to and sustain almost the same clockspeeds across all cores as their dualcore brethren. It used to be a difference back in the Sandy bridge days that even though boost speeds between quad and dual cores were similar, the quads couldn't sustain the boost unlike the dualcores. This was even more evident back in the Arrandale days.
Power consumption used to be an argument too but nowadays, the duals and quads idle at the same power so you won't really get battery life boost unless you are running full load a lot.
It is not a matter of if you will notice a difference, its more like you will constantly find uses for your machine in future and your Quadcore is better equipped to deal with the new challenges.

 

I remember a nearby university bought some Atom laptops back in 2008 or so because they were cheap.

Those laptops ended up in the decommissioned surplus store in just 2-3 years.

 

It took that long? My Atom netbook was decommissioned after six months. It was horrific.

 

To its credit, Atom netbooks were horrific. My old Celern M in Dell Inspiron from 2006 packed more of a punch.
Universities and various companies have to look out at 'cost efficiency' ratios... so if something is cheap and it works for them, then they will continue using it for longer periods of time.
Besides, those Atom netbooks might have upgradeable RAM at the very least which should make things somewhat easier.

Just last week I was cleaning up bloatware from my friends netbook that has a single core Atom.
Needless to say that the bloatware cleaning was tremendously helpful in speeding up the system and breathing new life into it, but it still showed its weakness in say streaming yuotube videos.

 

Absolutely. There's a good chance that even some web browsing will be able to take advantage of 4 cores in the next few years.

As stated above, modern quads can scale down just as low as dual-core processors, and have similar or identical turbo boost speeds, which allows them to scale up equal to way higher than any dual-core processor for anything you use the computer for. And they're not that much more expensive, either. The choice is clear.

 

Hey all,

I'm looking to buy the exact same laptop (latitude e6530) and i got a cpu related question too. The i7 quad core sounds great but since my current laptop has 1st gen i7, i can tell you that overheating is a MAJOR problem. Is that the case with the 3rd gen i7? Cause if it is I would rather go with a 3rd gen i5 at this point. I can't tell you how bad the overheating is with my hp envy which has a 1st gen i7.

 

My second-generation i7 quad core (i7-2720QM) has no overheating issues whatsoever during normal usage (gaming included). In order to push it to 80C or higher, I have to purposely cook the CPU using high-demand benchmarks like IntelBurn, Prime 95, etc. I've only seen temperatures crack up an extra 5C or so since I've bought the laptop, though that's because I haven't carried out a through dusting since buying it two years ago.

Considering that the third-generation typically has a lesser TDP than Sandy Bridge, they shouldn't heat up any worse, even though there were some initial heat problems in the beginning.

 

Overheating is not caused by the CPU itself, it is usually caused by one of these three:

• Clogged vents which is rather common and is easy to fix with canned air
• Degraded thermal paste which is rather rare and harder to fix, covered by warranty though
• Just plain bad thermal design or in other words, the OEM crammed an inadequate cooling system for the CPU they put in the laptop and should either have used a better cooling system or a CPU with lower TDP, that one is very dependent on the laptop model.

@Kuroi, the quad core i7s ending in qm have a 45W TDP regardless of the generation and the default TDP of the xm i7s has always been 55W. Ivy Bridge having a smaller die usually runs a few degrees above Sandy. Less surface area to dissipate the heat to the heatsink plate and same heat source means higher temps. Intel has kept the same TDP, but they ramped up the clock speeds and made the turbo more aggressive. As a result, an i7-3740qm at full turbo is pretty much on par with a desktop i7-2600.

@Tunch Overheating shouldn't be an issue on the latitude and if you get the pro support, Dell will fix it for you if it does happen (very unlikely, but there's always a few lemons with any laptop) due to a poorly seated heatsink or something like that.

 

With thermal paste over time, a lot of the OEM (HP, Dell, Acer, etc) stuff literally gets hard as a rock within a year and its thermal properties are that of a rock, and sometimes darn near impossible to remove because of it. Additionally it's not uncommon for a bad paste job from the factory. Of all the laptops I've repasted, including brand new ones, I've always been able to drop temps considerably by adding my own paste. So I wouldn't say degraded thermal paste is rather rare, as it is actually quite common. Unfortunately it scares most people away, and for good reason, but that's how I get a little bit of side business.

 

Bad application by the OEM is certainly common, but usually doesn't cause overheating in my experience. You can definitely do better with your own application though. However, the paste degrading to the point of overheating has never happened to anyone I know irl except to me once and that happened in less than a year so something clearly wasn't right.

 

I repasted my laptop, and it dropped the gaming temperature by around 5C to 10C. Well, that was before the new thermal paste started to fail within three months of usage...