The new Intel Core i7 740QM / 840QM / 940XM vs 720QM / 820QM / 920XM (+Benchmark)

If you plan to upgrade you might want to think about getting the x40xx CPUs as Intel has introduced new 45nm quadcores offering +133MHz:

740QM: 1.73-2.93GHz, 45W > (720QM: 1.6-2.8GHz, 45W)
840QM: 1.86-3.20GHz, 45W > (820QM: 1.73-3.06GHz, 45W)
940XM: 2.13-3.33GHz, 55W > (920XM: 2.0-3.2GHz, 55W)

Benchmarks using the W870CU with the MR HD5870:

English
German

I am sure prices are about to drop soon.

 

Anyone got turbo boost numbers?

i.e. It used to be:

i7 820QM: 2/8/10(4 core/2 core/1 core)
i7 720QM: 1/6/9

So the speed will turn out to be:

i7 820QM: 1.73GHz base/2.0GHz 4 cores/2.8GHz 2 cores/3.06GHz 1 core
i7 720QM: 1.6GHz base/1.73GHz 4 cores/2.4GHz 2 cores/2.8GHz 1 core

Is it now

i7 840QM: 2/8/10 - 1.86/2.13/2.93/3.2
i7 740QM: 1/6/9 - 1.73/1.86/2.53/2.93

??

 

That is most likely the case, yes.

 

I am totally confused by the benchmarks

the person below reports 10,000 score on 3DMark vantage with the 920xm...how did they get 15+K with the same laptop and the 940xm?

Me confused

 

What's reported in the benchmarks you're looking at for the 940XM is the CPU score, not the overall score. As you can see above, the CPU score for the 920XM was 14623.

 

No longer confused

 

The overclocked i7-940M seems to deliver quite a boost in some of those synthetic benchmarks. What utility did they use to achieve such higher (stable?) clocks?

BTW, Mr.X, how was it on the Island?

 

In benchmarks you will see a slight improvement going from a 920XM but in gaming virtually none.
One very good thing about these new chips is the price drope of the "old" ones.
You can find brand new OEM 920XM's for around $699, yeah that's still a lot of money but a few months back you couldn't find one for under $1000.
I say it's a win win situation either way

 

Or you could get a 840QM for less and have the same performance in games as with a 920XM (if no OC'ing through BIOS is available)

 

The i7-920XM is still 133MHz faster than the 840QM without overclocking, though.

 

Not @ max boost. They both equalize @3.2ghz. And since most games still benefit from the raw single/dual core power - you won't see a difference. The Notebookcheck's review only shows 1-2FPS difference in a few games they compared.
Now add the lower TDP and with the 840QM you have more headroom for OC'ing the GPU's

 

Max boost is single-core only, while quite a few games will use two cores, and some will use more. Also, the main issue between these CPUs isn't gaming performance anyway - spending that much money on a CPU for gaming alone is hard to justify. Granted, if you're not using the unlocked multipliers, you're still spending a lot on the 133MHz difference between the two, since that's only a 6.25% difference (and that's on four cores, where the 133MHz will make the most difference).

As for the TDP, that's just a label. The power consumption of the i7-840QM will likely be closer to the i7-920XM than it is to the i7-720QM, despite having the same official TDP as the latter.

 

Spending that much money on a CPU for non-gaming reasons is even more ridiculous For benching? Lol, yeah.
For video encoding? You will not feel much difference there as well. What remains, - VT? There, regardless of your rig, the system will agonize when running multiple OS instances. All in all I can justify gaming more than anything else.

Now for the TDP. If we trust their tests, the power consumption difference is ~10-15W between the two.
And even if it was less, I'd still point you to the OC'ers threads to see that every single watt matters at times

 

Yes, it's obvious that most of the higher Core i5s and i7s are overpriced; the i7-820QM and above are where it gets worse.

Nonetheless, even compared to a Core i5 the performance difference in most games will be very slight. Tasks like video encoding are probably the best use for a quad-core CPU, but the mobile quad-cores sacrifice a lot of clock speed to meet the heat/power limitations of a laptop, which weakens their advantage in that regard.

In any case, if we're talking about gaming alone, there's little justification for going above a Core i5 based on pricing.

Looking at the Notebookjournal results, it looks like TDPs might be more representative than I expected. It's strange that such a large jump in power consumption would occur with only a slight jump in clock speed, though.

 

I agree, i5 is enough for most games. Dual core i7-620M actually outperforms the quad 720QM in many scenarios. The upcoming i5-580M will boost to 3.3GHz - awesome performance without burning a hole in your wallet.

TDP:

This is strange indeed. The difference should appear when OC'ing the extreme CPU's but as far as I understand the testing system had no OC'ing options available in BIOS.

 

Wow. Sooooo tempting to grab a i5-580 laptop before high end SB arrives in Q2. I've waited a year, what's another half a year though for SB

 

The i5-580M looks like an i7-620M with only 3MB of L3 cache. The release price needs to be below $300, though. Depending on how competitive the pricing is, I'd consider upgrading the i5-430M in my GX640.

 

$699 where?

 

Good question, at least the 920XM ES / QS is almost half as expensive as the 940XM ES/QS.

 

From the article:

"In the BIOS of our test device can be four levels to choose. For the tests we have chosen the maximum overclocking. This is a Core i7 940XM then with clock speeds from 2.3 to 3.8 GHz. Necessary but is a notebook with a good cooling system and a strong enough power supply. In the case of the W870CU but that is no problem. The price of Intel's mobile Extreme-top models, however, is exorbitantly high."

The test bed is another one of the mySN W870CU's with the unlocked BIOS that we've been chasing for several months. Among other things, it permits increasing the multipliers by 4x. The unlocked BIOS seems to be the same one that was used with the original Sager 8760's but replaced soon thereafter when revised to recognize the 5870. Purported copies of the mySN BIOS show up on the Net periodically, but so far have been bogus, i.e., not unlocked. They seem to be used primarily for review samples.

 

Ooops, missed that part, thanks for correcting.

 

believe me there will be a significant difference in video editing. many programs are already quad core aware and are already migrating to 64-bit, thanks to the explosion of HD video.
having a robust cpu AND gpu is a must for video editing, more so if you doing it on a laptop.

 

The question was : 840QM vs 920XM (no OC'ing). The difference is gonna be negligible between the two in video editing (and pretty much everywhere).

 

Nearly identical performance with no o/c'ing. And because of the limited overclocking headroom of the 900m series extreme processors, not much real difference under any circumstances.

 

Yeah, 6.25% difference in clock speed you likely wouldn't even notice.

 

Still waiting for 840QM ES prices. 920XM is down to just ~$450 these days.

 

Overclocking the 840QM? If it would have unlocked multipliers, you would still have to disable HT so 4 threads are gone. Btw, I own a 920XM ES (got it shipped for 450USD before there were x40xx CPUs - nice deal as I still believe) and since the last and latest BIOS update, the oc option has gone?
lackofcheese is nothing but right. I have a max TDP of 65W and not 55W.

Edit:
So that is the explanation? Either oc or MR support?
Have there been issues that the option had to go? Notebookjournal reported issues when they got the first testing sample but I thought they had been fixed.

 

I don't know about that. I can hit 2.6 GHz on all 4 cores with a BCLK overclock. I think that's fairly substantial compared to the base 2.13 GHz clock.

 

So you got it working huh?
That's great!

 

im not sure. thats .14ghz*4cores=0.56ghz difference in a linear equation (which we all know its not but just fot illustration purposes).

anywhere else it could be negligible but in hd video encoding there could be a noted difference (ie 1hr encoding vs 50min encoding)

but i will agree that the 840 is the better bang for buck

 

If you're going to make a guess like that, use percentages. If we assume that both use their full Turbo Boost, it's 2.267GHz vs 2.133GHz on 4 cores, or a 6.25% difference. In your video encoding example, my estimate would be that if the 840QM took 1 hour, the 920XM would take around 56.5 minutes.

 

fair enough. i was actually looking more at 1hr:55min after i typed it which kinda matches yours.
for some it may not seem like much, but if your batch encoding a number of hd files, you'll take those 5mins.

 

Have you discounted the W860CU with a Quadro FX2800M because of the deal you can get on the HP? Only asking because if you're using it for CAD then the FX2800M is a good step up from the Quadro/FirePro options that HP and Lenovo offer.

 

W860CU has to have a true anti glare screen to qualify for a business notebook. Also, it's a bit thick and heavy and doesn't have a spill resistant keyboard. Ideally, it has to be semi-rugged. Both ThinkPads and Elitebooks (also Dell Precision M) can sustain a lot of bumping and dropping before they stop functioning.
Elitebooks are especially tough, you can even step on those when the lid is closed and even the screen will still function normally.
In addition, both have the touch stick or track point, which is a must for a business system, IMHO.
FX2800M alone doesn't make the system 100% fit for a business use.

And BTW, you can get a a Lenovo W510 with a 920XM for ~1700$.

 

I wasn't suggesting that the W860CU is a 100% business notebook, simply pointing out that the Quadro cards available in the chassis are much more powerful than those in the Lenovo and HP - and seeing as gsparx is buying it for college I wasn't really taking field durability into account From my experience with our Quadro customers the features you listed aren't deal breakers at all, perhaps we are talking about two different parts of the market.

 

What are you talking about? Both Lenovo W701 and HP 8740w are available with Quadro FX2800M or Quadro FX3800M. The ATI FirePro M7820 found in the HP 8740w appears to be pretty much within the same range of performance as FX3800M (if not better...).

 

That's right, but he was talking about a 15" not 17"
In 15" sector the best is the FX1800M and M5800 found in HP 8540w and Dell M4500.

 

Yup, we were discussing the W510 mentioned by another user whose posts have been deleted (possibly because we went off topic talking about GPUs), so my comment about the GPUs doesn't make any sense now - hence the confusion