Intel Core i5-540M Processor vs Intel Core i5-520M Processor

I'm debating whether to get the i5-540M or i5-520M but I'm not an expert. Opinions? Thanks in advance!

 

The 540M is slightly faster (that seems to be the only difference), but also slightly more expensive.

 

If you're going to upgrade, i would say get the i7 or nothing. For typical use, you won't notice a difference no matter what you do (i5, i5, C2D what have you)...

If you're doing cpu intensive things and productivity is important, then you may as well shell out the extra $100 (i think it's a 10% performance boost or so? the i5-520 will probably give a negligable boost in speed)

 

It's actually just a 133 MHz difference for a 2-3 GHz processor. That's 3-5%.

 

thanks all for the feedback. I guess I'll settle for the i7 since I do some gaming and video editing.

 

What about power consumption? Will there be a big difference in battery life between these 3 CPUs?

 

The i7 has more Cache,but AFAIK the have the same TDP of 35W.
In worst case I see a difference of 30min in battery life bewteen the i7-620 and the i5-520.

Check some benchmarks here:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i5-540M-Notebook-Processor.23748.0.html

The difference between i5-520M and i5-540M is smaller than between the i5-540M and i7-620M.

 

Best bang for your buck would be the 540M in most cases (depending on cost of upgrade from 520M). The performance difference as you scale into i7 territory is minimal compared to power consumption and price.

 

what does communications suite translate to? Like what tasks typically?

 

i would say stick with the i5's 520M, in real life use, the performance difference of these i5 dual core and i7 dual core is minimal. You would get better performance by using the money towards the SSD.

 

Gaming tends to be more graphics intense than CPU driven. The CPU comparisons include this paragraph:

Your graphics performance should be the same with any of the processor discussed so far. If you want a quantum performance boost, you'll need a quad core i7 with discrete graphics. The W510/710 offer that kind of performance along with additional RAM slots.

 

"communications suite" refers the the communications suite of test in 3D vantage. And being a communications suite it test it probably does a lot of encrypting and unencrypting, which is what the AES acceleration is all about.

So for most users I don't see it has having any real effect on performance. And in context of the OP, both the i5-540 and i5-520 have accelerated AES encryption. The i3 range and i5-430m don't.

 

+1. I agree totally with lead_org here. The 3 CPUs offered vary little in performance but vary more in price and heat output and power usage. Get the SSD if you can afford it. Or better yet, put in an aftermarket SSD. One of the newer ones with "TRIM" and the latest controller firmware. (Intel comes to mind.)

As for the AES acceleration... if you plan to install the Ultimate version of Windows 7 you will have BitLocker available to encrypt your hard disk or any external disk (including flash drives). I've used this feature and it's very slooooow to encrypt/decrypt. The Core i5/7 chips that have the AES New Instructions are reported to speed that process up considerably (one report said by a factor of 10x).