So, why do they call it an i7?

From what I have been reading, there is absolutely no difference between the i5 and the i7 found in the Z. (Clock speed's and L2 Cache aside)

However, there has to be some difference as people on these boards claim the i7 uses more power an kills the battery faster.

Please.. School me on this.

 

Absolutely no difference except speed and cache? Sounds like you answered your own question.

 

^ exactly what Beaups said...

That's the point of a i7/i5... the i7 is supposed to perform better than the i5 Essentially, the i5 and i7 are the same chips, except either the i5 has been downclocked to meet demand for i5 chips, or they dont perform to i7 specifications. Intel can't afford to have 3 production lines for the different chips... especially when attempting to make i7 chips, only maybe half of them perform at i7 specifications. So instead, they make i7 chips, then those that fail it become i5 or i3... and if not enough fail, they'll just underclock them...

 

Gotcha.

So this the root of my initial question.

I would like to take advantage of the VAIOSAVE500Z coupon, but its a 2.4 i5 with turbo boost to 2.93. The base model now is a 2.53 up to 2.8.

If I were to be playing Starcraft or Black Ops, will I see a significant improvement with the new i7 at 2.8 up to 3.47?

If I did get the 2.4, do the games run at 2.93 with turboboost? Or should I be mainly concerned with the standard clock speeds?

If its going to be worth the coin, I would pass on the 256 SSD upgrade. I unfortunately cant have both.

Thoughts?

P.S. - I am a converting longtime Mac user that is tryng to get back in the swing of this PC world.

 

Quad-core i7 does not have integrated graphics as an option. Supposedly the i7 itself is not consuming any more power, but because while on battery power you cannot switch to integrated graphics to conserve power, the end result is less battery time.

I doubt it. I think the biggest improvement you are going to see from an i7 is when multitasking or running programs optimized for quad-core use. More likely with the Vaio to be held back by video card than the i5 I think.

I could be completely wrong on that though. Hardware is honestly so subjective.

 

OK, but since the Z's i7 is not a Quad, I won't have an issue switching to integrated graphics on battery.. Correct?

That would be really lame.

Sorry again, I have not had options like this for a long time. With Mac, its this or that. My head is about to explode with all these options on a silly laptop. I could only imagine building a PC nowadays.

 

That would be my understanding. But this fact makes for a common misconception that "i7 eats more power," which may explain why you saw that comment related to the Vaio. As far as I know and can tell, i7 eats the same amount of battery as i5 while on dedicated graphics.

 

This Signature Z13 looks tempting for the price.

VPCZ13SGX/BJ (2,099)

Its only 128 SSD, but has Verizon/Sprint wireless, high end i7 and a cool looking lid.

When I price this out at Sony, their website is about $200+ tax more (without the snazzy lid)!

 

This. Very much this.

Just go for i5. It will be more than good enough for gaming, as the potential improvement you'd get out of an i7 will be less than 5%. Core i5 2.4 ghz is not the bottleneck for the GT 330M.

 

My experience with turboboost are very good, but the cpus dont reach the maximum clock advertised at all in order to not exceed the thermal specification. My i7 620m (2,66 ghz, up to 3,33 w/ turboboost) usually runs at 3,06 ghz when under full load.

 

The i5 580 M is almost on par with the i7 640 M and faster than i7 620 M

 

I understand the desire people have for justifying having bought what they bought, but this is just plain wrong; there is no way an i5-580M can be faster than an i7-620M.

i5-580M: 2.66 GHz (3.33 max turbo), 3 MB SC
i7-620M: 2.66 GHz (3.33 max turbo), 4 MB SC
i7-640M: 2.80 GHz (3.46 max turbo), 4 MB SC

Otherwise, they're pretty much identical.

My guess is that these all come from the same die, but are separated by binning.
I.e. i5-580Ms failed the secondary cache tests, and had one of the four caches disabled as a result, while i7-640Ms passed factory tests with a 21x multiplier.

 

If you're deciding between the i7 and the 256 SSD, go with the SSD, the i5 is fast enough for pretty much everything you're going to be doing unless you're going to do CPU intensive tasks like video encoding or massive photoshop, autoCAD, etc. It was discussed that the i7-620M(2.66-3.33) might give you a 5-10% boost in performance over the i5 they offered back then, but in reality how many times are you going to have you CPU at max load? I personally know, the only reason i got the i7 was for bragging rights, but all i do with my laptop is pretty much game, and the bottleneck for that is the GPU (which you can overclock pretty decently)

with only 128 GB of storage, your computer only sees 125GB of storage due to marketing practices, then there's the ~8GB recovery partition, so you've got 117 GB, install a few games, applications ~40 GB... you've got 77 GB... due to proper SSD maintenence, you should always keep ~20-25% of your SSD free... which means... 77 - (.2*125) = 52 GB for all your needs etc. you're probably going to run out of space if you download a few more games or store music, photos, videos.

You could go and install a new hard drive in the place of the DVD drive, but that'll cost ~$100 for caddy + HDD, but that requires you to open up your Z, etc. (and it'll lower battery life, increase the weight of the Z, and make you have to be more careful as there's now a spinning drive inside your Z)

 

I am not justifying my purchase, just stating the fact

You can read about the i5 580 m here.
Quoting a line from the above link

" The performance of the Core i5-580M should be a bit beyond the Core i7-620M and therefore the second fastest dual core CPU for laptops in 2010."

They have a lot of benchmarks too, you can see that the i5 580m actually outperforms the i7 620m in most tests