W700 Vs W701 processors

I'm aiming on W70x so comparing processors and disks (this is what i care most for my daily work) i noticed that the W700 listed on some ebay has the Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo Quad Core Extreme (3.06ghz/1066mhz) but seems these are 6MB cache and others are Intel® Core™ 2 Duo QUAD CORE Extreme processor QX9300 (2.53GHz 1066MHz) which are 12MB cache

then going to lenovo's website on the W701 processors:
Intel Core i7-720QM Processor (6M Cache, 1.60 GHz)
Intel Core i7-820QM Processor (8M Cache, 1.73 GHz)
Intel Core i7-920XM Processor Extreme Edition (8M Cache, 2.00 GHz)


so moving from W500 2.8Ghz 4MB cache and 64GB SSD disk which seems a "little" getting slow for what i do these days i'm aiming to move to a faster thinkpad, so i thought of:
getting highest processor speed/cache on a thinkpad (fastest would be W700)
getting fastest SSD disk
something like 4 or 8GB ram although i know i won't need more than 4 as my issues aren't ram related they are disk I/O or processor related.

so what do you recommend?

 

Well, if I understand what you're getting at:

I believe the Core i7-720QM is a bit slower than the Core 2 Quad QX9300, but the i7-820QM and i7-920XM are both more powerful. Comparing exact clock speeds and cache amount is inaccurate, the best way is probably to check synthetic CPU benchmarks.

In regards to SSDs, some of the best disks out now are the Intel X-25M G2 drives, with the 160GB a tad bit faster at disk write than the 80GB variant.

Not positive, but I think the W701 has 4 RAM slots, so it can easily get to 4GB+ of RAM.

In short, you'll be able to build a more powerful system with the W701, but the W700 will obviously be a more affordable choice.

 

The processor speed isn't the best comparison, it's only comparable with the same class/generation of processors. For instance, the clock speed on the Core i7 quads can be compared to each other, but you can't compare a Core i7 in terms of clockspeed to a Core 2 quad (or duo), since the different microarchitectures are going to skew the comparison.

The i7 quads are the fastest processors out there now. However, an i7 dual can be just as fast as a quad in an application that doesn't take advantage of multi-core programming.

 

then i believe i would invest in W501 rather than W700 (to avoid the size) since i7 processors are available both on the W701 and W501 ?

i mainly connect it to my thinkpad usb keyboard and my ThinkVision L220X monitor so if the W701 would to faster i'll go for it if not then i'll stick to W501

non of my applications requires multi-core so i believe investing to cache is more important and probably the speed.

i'm a heavy thunderbird and firefox user loaded with tons of extensions and it uses all my resources where firefox or thunderbird hangs and i have to manually kill them and restart (btw i'm on ubuntu linux not windows)

so what i want the fast machine todo is reading/writing files with fast disks and larger storage wouldn't harm. but i'm sure i'll goo to SSD from my past experience noway to compare it with 7.2K RPM disks

Thanks