i5 2410M vs 17 2630QM

For what reasons would someone be justified in spending $80 to go from the i5 to the i7 processor?

 

Mobile Processors - Benchmarklist - Notebookcheck.net Tech

 

i5 has hyper-threading disabled while i7 has it enabled. i5 has dual core while i7 has quad core.

 

i7 it is, then. thanks.

 

Where did you read that?

Intel i3 does hyper threading, but not turbo boost.
Its also dual core only.

Intel i5 does both hyper threading and turbo boost.
Its also only dual core.

Intel i7 does both hyper threading and turbo boost.
Intel cpus with "m" after name are dual core while intel cpus with "qm" or "xm" are quad cores.

 

Indeed, mobile i5s do HT. He was prolly talking about the desktop i5-2400. But then, this is a notebook forum...

 

yeah, had my information mixed up.

 

Also the i5 2410 only supports 8GB of Ram. Go to the i7

 

My main selling point with this upgrade is that you get a proper quad core.
Your games will be thankfull.

 

plus it comes standard with the P150HM/NP8150

 

Depends on what games you like to play... i7, as far as gaming goes, might be totally useless.

 

for gaming i7 has virtually no benefit for gaming and 8gb of ram is more than enough.

 

The differences are:

2410m
2 cores/4 threads
2.3Ghz/2.9Ghz Turbo
35w TDP

2630
4 cores/8 Threads
2.0Ghz/2.9Ghz Turbo
45w TDP

This means that the 2410m is faster at stock speeds without turbo on its two cores than the quad core and uses less power. For applications and games that aren't quad core optimized (a lot of them)- you'll have slightly better CPU performance than the quad. However, if you run highly threaded apps like video encoding/archiving/VM's, the quad will win all the time.

In straight benchmarks (which are optimized for quad), the 2630 is nearly 2x faster. This is to be expected for a processor with 2x the cores though

Intel Core i7 2630QM Notebook Processor - Notebookcheck.net Tech
Intel Core i5 2410M Notebook Processor - Notebookcheck.net Tech

 

When the next Xbox and Playstation come out, dual cores and gaming will be officially divorced.

 

Its been my experience that overall a computer runs smoother with a quad core. For singular applications like games they must be coded specifically for multi core. As far as I can tell from a code perspective anything optimized for more than one core *should* do better on a quad, unless it was specially coded to have only two threads (which is just stupid...).

 

I would expect with the amount of quad cores around now that in the not so distant future there will be a lot more games that can take full advantage of all four cores.

 

For $80 there's no down side to going for the quad core options. It's a much better choice.

 

Let's look at CPU scaling in The Witcher 2.

This is a sign of things to come.