X220 i3 or i5?

Looking at the i3 and i5 options on the X220...and after looking at benchmarks of the two processors...I'm having a hard time deciding whether its worth it to fork over $100 to go from the i3 to the cheapest i5...

Is there a significant performance increase in day to day tasks?

That, and how does the battery fare between the two options?

 

Unless you've got a specific need to push the CPU frequently, I don't think you'll see much of a benefit from upgrading.

 

I concur. Unless you're pushing it, you probably wouldn't see much difference.

While i3/i5/i7 has the same TDP, I still have a feeling that i3/i5 would probably produce less heat. -- If that's the case and you will be running the fan at lower speed (you are most likely want to do do that), having slower CPU might be an advantage in terms of controlling temperature.

 

I have an i3 in my X201i. Although it is now a previous generation processor, I can still share my thoughts.

At some points I had some buyers remorse, thinking I should have payed more for a i5 or maybe even i7 CPU, but truth is, the i3 works just great. The heaviest use of the CPU is when I use the X201i for software development (Visual Studio, IIS, SQL Server), but it can even run games on low settings (like StarCraft II or World of Warcraft) - because of the integrated graphics, the CPU is that matters here.

Based on my experience I just don't see why I would have needed a better CPU. But it is of course dependent on what you want to use the computer for.

You might want to save some money and rather upgrade RAM or get an SSD drive, I think the performance difference will be more real (visible) with those kinds of upgrades.

 

$100 is pretty steep. Where are you ordering from? In the US it's a $50 upgrade.

 

Here in the UK, it's a £75 upgrade. I swapped over my faulty i5-2410 X220 for an i3. I was hoping it might run a bit cooler than the i5, but it in fact, runs about five degrees warmer, browsing at around 45 C. That said, it reached 68 in wprime to the i5's 83.

Performance seems similar. I could be imagining it but it seems to take a good bit longer to charge up.

I'll only be stretching it with occasional audio decoding and rendering. Most of the time will be multimedia duties.

Here, only the i3 is an X220i. The lower end i5 is still a X220, so the 'i' must refer to lack of turbo, I guess.

 

For $50 the i5 is a no brainer in the US since you'll get all of it back in resale plus more. If you put price aside, the i5 is actually significantly faster when you push it because Lenovo has turbo boost enabled pretty much constantly. But few users use the cpu like that frequently and you won't notice the difference for everyday tasks. So go for the i3 and put the $100 towards a good SSD. That will brings you far more noticeable speed gains.

EDIT: price has gone up in the US from $50 to $100 for the i5-2410. And $55 vs. $50 for the i5-2520. They're giving the 320gb hdd standard now though so it makes up for it to an extent, but still there's the opportunity cost so go with the i3. And 3yr On-Site is on sale for just $98 now!

 

I wouldn't pay an extra $5 for the i5 cause the i3 already has more juice than I need. Like I said unless you push the CPU frequently, it probably won't make any difference.

 

Save the money for the IPS display (branded "Premium HD Display")

 

The only places where the i5 has a significant advantage are in visualization and encryption. (And even then the low-end i5 doesn't have any advantage over the i3.) If you are going to make heavy use of either, the i5 is probably worth it.

Otherwise, you'll probably never notice the difference, and the CPU will probably be mostly idle.

 

Yep, go with the i3. I had the i5 2410 in the e420s and returned that(crappy screen/build quality) and got the x220i with the i3 and i cant tell one bit of difference in the performace department with regards to normal web browsing,HD video playback and most common daily tasks. I was worried about the downgrade in cpu being noticeable prior to getting it. I dont think i'll miss it unless i start encoding lots of video and i have a quad core desktop for that stuff.

 

The upgrade between i3 and i5 was always $50.

You have to downgrade the operating system to Home Premium with the i5 option.

 

Just to affirm what DStaal has written, if you go higher than an i3, then go with the highest priced i5 to get VT-d and AES support ... which by the way you probably don't need because if you did you would know

 

I've had 2 choices: 750 euro for i3 + TN screen or 950 euro for i5 + IPS. I'm I picked the cheaper one. i3 seems to be less problematic (no throttling, lower temps -> quieter fan, maybe a little longer battery life as well?) and powerful enough to run 1080p, even SC2 smoothly on low.
And spending 200 euro just on the IPS screen is kinda a waste if I spend more time in front of my desktop. I could buy a decent 23" IPS screen for this money also. (and I probably will, soon)

I'd say it's not really worth getting anything better than i3 unless you want to use your laptop for visualisation or some professional stuff, or it unlocks you an option to get IPS. (I bet it's worth it, just not 200 euro like in my case)

 

Not necessarily true. With light use, my i3 X220 runs about seven degrees C warmer than my previous i5 X220 and is slightly noisier. At full stretch (wprime), the i3 is about twelve degrees cooler but that is to be expected because it doesn't turbo. It all depends on how the thermal paste is applied from machine to machine, ime.

 

The IPS screen is a better upgrade than the CPU.

 

I would be in the boat of going with the i5 because I believe it would have better resell value when the time comes. They have the same number of cores, but I just think some people will find the i5 name more appealing.

 

What's the max cpu temp under sustained heavy load for those of you that have x220's w/ i3's?

If I got one of these I'd be running Gentoo Linux on it, which can be brutal on cpu's that run hot. I would probably be playing some games on it too.

 

I7 :d :d :d

 

i could be wrong but i saw from somewhere that i5 has some kind of power savings feature built in so a notebook with i5 would have a better battery life.

can anyone confirm this?

if not true, the battery life between i3 and i5 should be identcal under the same condition?

 

The i3 has all the power saving features of the i5, so they'll be very close. As tested by NotebookCheck, on idle, the i3 does get slightly better battery life than the i5, but it's pretty much inconsequential.

 

Normally I would say i3, but I found something interesting.

When there is a sale the i5 is actually cheaper than the i3. Select the x220 with the i5, downgrade the CPU to the lowest i5 and downgrade to Home Premium. You get the i5 and save $4. Yes, no?

 

i5 is a commodity chip of the i series, and Lenovo would probably order a lot of them, so it would make sense.

 

Holy cow, AboutThreeFitty is right. Still though, I'm very concerned about the reports of very high load temps with this laptop. I plan on playing games and using Gentoo linux (a lot of cpu use during system upgrades), and temps greater than 65 C on my old Vostro 1400 worry me, let alone reports of 95 C temps on a CPU in the x220!

 

If you are looking at playing games why don't you look at a different computer? Most all computers this size are going to get a bit hot during gaming.

 

I have a desktop PC for gaming most of the time. I would only be playing games occasionally on a laptop, but I will probably be doing other things with it that might stress the cpu (Gentoo). I'm looking for a laptop that is smaller and lighter than my current one (Vostro 1400). Getting hot during high cpu load is understandable, but getting within 10 degrees C of water boiling point is....a bit much!

 

Under high graphics and processing load, the X220 will get hot, regardless of whether you have the i3 or i5. It shouldn't make too much difference. The i7 model, though, is the only one with the throttling issues.

 

Is there any way to disable turbo on the i5, for even cooler max temps? And does using better thermal paste make a noticeable difference?
I should also add that if I decide not to go with the x220, the x120e is my next choice. From what I've read it seems like it runs quite a bit cooler thanks to the lower TDP.

 

my friend has the i7 chip in his X220. i replaced the thermal paste with MX-3 and now under max sustained load it stabilises at a much more reasonable 85*c, similar to my X201

 

Is there an option to disable the turbo boost feature of the i5/i7's in the bios?

 

Yes, you can disable Turbo Boost. I believe Power Manager has a setting for it, and I think you can also disable it in BIOS. Personally, I wouldn't mess with thermal paste until late in the laptop's lifetime, when the thermal compound degrades and isn't as effective anymore. From the factory, the thermal pad should be fine.

Remember that although the X120e's APU produces less heat, the cooling system is also smaller and not as capable as the X220's. For one, the cooling fan on the X120e is far more annoying than that of my T500 or my dad's X220.

 

Yeah, I've just done more reading into the x120e and noticed that it is pretty bad as far as noise and heat dissipation goes. notebookcheck.net says it'll even shut down if it gets hot enough (above 90 C).

I wouldn't be using the powermanager because I'd be running linux, not windows. As long as I'm able to disable the turbo feature in the bios, though, I'd be satisfied. Can anyone verify that it can be disabled in the bios without using any power management software?

 

i disagree. its a simple thing to do if you're reasonably handy with disassembly, and clearly the model has heat issues under sustained load out of the box. its not so much the thermal compound that is at fault, but the sloppy application at the factory. the OP clearly is concerned about the heat, so before disabling anything or thinking about other more extreme measures such as underclocking or undervolting, a simple reapplication of thermal paste would be good to do.

 

The thermal compound are probably applied using a batch semi automated mechanical system, but variations can occur.

 

Can the thermal compound be replaced without voiding the warranty?
Can anyone also verify the bios settings for i5/i7 turbo?

 

That is different for each country, but the heatsink is not a CRU, so i would not advise you to do it yourself. Ask the warranty depot to do it for you.

 

I think I'd rather leave the heatsink alone for the time being, if I got one. First priority in obtaining lower temps would be to disable turbo...I don't really understand why you'd want to temporarily OC your laptop CPU in the first place, but to each his own..

I also just realized that the current sale ends on the 17th. You can get an x220 with an i5, 4gb ram, and ips panel + webcam for just $745 right now.

 

That's a pretty good deal, particularly since it also has the desirable IPS panel along with a Core i5 processor. It wasn't long ago that it was going for $950+ for such similar spec.

 

There was some pretty good deals when the X220 first came out.

 

It does look like a good deal...which is why I'm anxiously waiting for any x220 i5 owners to take a quick look in their bios at the power/turbo management settings (whether turbo can be turned off or not). Just over a day left!

 

'no' to both of those.   the BIOS doesn't have specific management for turbo boost and disabling it isn't likely going to reduce temps under stress anyway.   the factory thermal compound is shin-etsu and in my opinion not worth replacing.

fact is, the X220 was never designed nor intended to be a gaming notebook.   but, if you're going to use it as such, an i5-2520M or higher processor is likely your best bet.

 

Thanks for the input, that's what I needed to know. I wouldn't have been doing heavy gaming on it, so a lot of cpu power wouldn't have been necessary, but rather would've been playing the occasional TF2, Left 4 Dead, WoW, etc., when I am on the road. From what I've heard though just a few minutes of a game like WoW can bring the CPU in the x220 close to its heat limit, and accounts like that make me hesitant to spend nearly $1k on that machine.

 

The only advantage the i3 has over the i5 is price. If the latter costs a similar amount, then it's a no brainer.

Just did two runs of wprime on my i3-2310 X220i and one of the cores briefly got as high as 78C, according to HWiNFO64. Ambient 25C

Strange because I'm sure it only reached around 68C when the machine was new. Maybe I didn't have it on Max Performance (highest) back then. Hmmm.

For comparison's sake, my previous i5 X220 reached around 84C during wprime. Similar ambient.

 

Oh, I forgot to ask - are there any cpu power management-related settings (besides disabling it all together) in the bios at all?

 

I installed Microsoft Street and Map with usb GPS...the CPU was reached beyond its limit, and I couldn't even shut it down...untill it displayed 'fan error' and shut itself down

it was i7

 

Generally don't go higher than the 2520M. The only higher processors available are the 2540M and 2620M, and they only provide very insignificant gains.

 

the 2520m will be good enough, anything higher you will be charged a higher premium.

 

I ended up ordering the x220i yesterday. Almost every firsthand i3-2310m account that I've read says it has lower max temps. I figure it'll still be much faster than my old T7250 Core 2 Duo anyways. Ironically, I ended up paying $4 more for the i3 than for the lowest end i5.

I'm looking forward to getting it! i3 2310m, IPS screen, with the (now standard) 4 gb of ram and 320gb 7200rpm hard drive.

 

nice... i think the X220 is probably is one of the best X series mainstream laptop ever. The IPS LCD is the icing on the cake.

 

Dear god lenovo's website is bad....they 'forgot' my password last night and it took 3 retries to reset it, and this evening they've forgotten it again. Good thing I have a screenshot with the order number in it, otherwise I wouldn't know any information about my order (I haven't received any emails either, but the hold is on my credit card)