What kind of cpu wouldn't be a bottleneck for dual 680m sli

Hey guys,
I have been doing alot of research to figure out which laptop brand to buy. I am pretty much settled on the NP9370. This laptop has the option for you to get the gtx680m in sli :thumbsup:. I understand most of you would say that I don't really need it, but I usually buy my laptops and keep them for at least 4 years. So the option to add another gpu is great.
My questions are:
1- Since I am planning to add a second gpu later, can I get the i7 3820QM or do I need the 3920XM? Do you think if I get the 3820QM it'll be a bottleneck?
2- I am planning to get 16GBs of RAM, would that be enough or would it become a bottleneck also? (I can always add more later)
3- Do you guys recommend that I get the sli setup right now or wait? It would seem logical that in a year or so, the 680m would become much cheaper to buy, but how hard is it to install?

Thank you guys in advance for your help

 

Depends on what you're going to do with it. If it's gaming only, there is not going to be a big difference between the 3820QM and the 3920XM except that you make Intel salesmen grin.

2) I guess 8GB is more or less the standard now, games don't naturally use more than 4GB anyway. It's for example very rare for Battlefield 3 to use more than 4 GB. So if you want to plan ahead, 16GB is the way to go. Anything higher is just ridiculous and not worth the money even though RAM is kinda cheap nowadays.

3) If you can afford it, get it right away. By the time the 680M's get cheaper, the 780M will become an option and you're going to ask yourself the same question

 

1. I don't think even a 3610QM would be a bottleneck (in gaming).

2. 8GB Ram will be enough for gaming for years to come.

3. Since it seems you have the cash, go for it. If you want to save, buy the second 680m later, and possibly you could also look into 7970m crossfire, since it seems to be pretty much trading blows with 680m sli.

 

I'd get the i7-3720qm. It's partially unlocked so you can OC up to 4ghz. Usually the 3820qm is a waste since it's a good $100-$200 more for .1ghz more speed, which won't be noticeable for gaming.

 

3610QM is sometimes a bottleneck even for a single GTX680M, Final Fantasy XIV town area rendering is one of the examples.

 

You are correct as far as price/GHz increase, but how much performance increase can you see going from 6M L3 cache to 8M L3 cache.

So you'd recommend 3720QM as a minimum?

Just to clarify (I should have mentioned that in the beginning), I will only be using my laptop for gaming/school work (word, excel, ect.)/multitasking (a lot of times I'll have 4 or 5 word and/or excel files open + like 20 browser windows open).
I believe gaming will be the most demanding thing I'll be doing on the laptop as I don't really do any audio or video editing.

 

Depends on the games you play, for BF3 3610QM is powerful enough because it doesn't rely on the CPU that heavily, for FFXIV or GW2, 3610QM is a little weak for them, 3720QM won't bring you 60FPS either but will surely have at least 5-8 more FPS than with 3610QM at certain areas that require heavy CPU usage.

 

What is with GW2 btw? Apparently the recommended CPU is a Core 2 Quad yet even those with sandy and ivys are running with sub-60FPS. I looked at gameplay, and no offense but I don't see much going on that would justify 100% usage of a 3610QM.

 

Recommended is recommended, doesn't state anything giving constant 60FPS. GW2 = Guild Wars 2. For Guild Wars 2 it seems like NVIDIA has fixed the 60% GPU usage at some zones related to CPU usage.

However when playing Final Fantasy XIV, with 3610QM + GTX680M, as long there are more than 20 characters on the screen or in town, the FPS drops below 35FPS, GPU utilization is no longer 99%, instead it became 60-70%. With the 3740QM that I later on installed, the GPU usage did went up by 8%-12% compared to 3610QM when there are more than 20 characters on the screen, and also 6-10 FPS increase with the 3740QM over the 3610QM.

However, FFXIV doesn't use 100% of your CPU, but boosting the clock frequency will help the FPS and GPU usage greatly when in a zone with multiple characters. This is where the 3610QM shows the weak sign in this game.

 

So the game is simply unoptimized to use the overall power of the 3610qm. Kind of like how older games liked a 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo over a 2.0GHz Core 2 Quad. This will change in favor for quad cores eventually. The 3610 isn't weak, it is just developers not taking the time to use more threads.

 

1- 3820QM will be more than enough.

2- 16GB is great, even at that it's overkill, but at the price of memory these days, why not, pull the trigger.

3- Do you want, or NEED to change right now? The 680M might be cheaper a year down the line, but it won't be a night and day price change.

 

Yup. The game is badly optimized. 3610QM is more powerful than a I7 2500. However, if the 3720QM performs better, then it performs better. Still, the power difference between the two is indeed very small.

 

That's what I meant by depending on the game, you can't expect every game to be well optimized and use nearly 100% of the CPU, and no doubt 3610QM is a little weak for this game, and that's the real world situation,

 

Just curious, did you try Throttlestop to see if it was a throttling issue?

 

Yep, been using ThrottleStop back from July 02 and now using official release. I can tell you on the P150EM without throttleStop FFXIV in town area can dip into 25FPS zone when all 4 cores run at 2.3GHz with the 3610M, 32FPS when ThrottleStop enabled.

 

I've been following different nbr threads for a while before I joined and have seen multiple ppl talk about ThrottleStop. Is this something you need only after overclocking? And if there's a specific thread that talks about it and explains what it does can you please point me towards it. Thanks.

 

Here you go:

ThrottleStop - Performance Adjustment Tool for Core 2 / Core i CPUs

I used it with my Acer 8930g, to prevent the CPU from throttling. It basically increased performance by making sure the cpu didn't slow down on its own. Newest version is 5.0.