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ccs_hello
Postmaster
Reged: 07/03/04
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mobile Core i5 or mobile Core i7 for new laptop
#5277749 - 06/18/12 08:50 PM
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Intel released its 3rd gen i5 and i7 in recent days. Finally few Ultrabooks start to show up on the market just now. I was shopping for one this morning (first day Zenbook Prime is made available in US) and quickly grabbed the last one in stock. I do not have time to think about/comparing buying a cheaper ($200 cheaper) Core i5 version or Core i7 version. End up getting the i7.
Now I have time to check if that i7 deserves the aura (actually also found out quite a bit of the price difference goes back to what Intel sells for.)
It turns out for mobile i5 (Core i5-3317U), there is close to just few differences with mobile i7 (Core i7-3517U). Both are dual core, 2 hyperthreading (HT) per core. I.e., for mobile i5, HT is enabled! So the real differences are: 3M cache vs. 4M cache and 1.7GHz vs. 1.9 GHz CPU.
TurboBoost (occasional overclocking) 2.6 GHz vs. 3 GHz.
See http://ark.intel.com/compare/65707,65714
And that is all. Obviously it's a brilliant marketing gimmick.
The mobile i7 is just slightly better and my $200 is paid to upgrade the word i5 -> i7.
I wrote this down so I hope for the upgraders, a better intelligent decision can be made.
Clear Skies!
ccs_hello
(Obviously this post only reflects my personal opinion  .)
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psonice
Pooh-Bah
Reged: 07/24/09
Loc: Warrington, UK
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Re: mobile Core i5 or mobile Core i7 for new laptop
[Re: ccs_hello]
#5278313 - 06/19/12 06:37 AM
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I think it's not really that simple. A 10% speed increase doesn't just mean your photoshop processing finishes 0.1s faster - it means the system hits 100% busy less often so it can feel a lot more than 10% faster. Also, if it finishes faster the CPU can go to sleep faster, so you might find you get better battery life too. The cache increase can help some jobs, so you might get 20% speed increase instead of just 10 (although this is probably quite rare).
But yeah, I'm not sure it's worth $200. That money would be better spent on an SSD (unless it already has one) because that would give a MUCH bigger speed boost.
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ccs_hello
Postmaster
Reged: 07/03/04
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Re: mobile Core i5 or mobile Core i7 for new laptop
[Re: psonice]
#5278364 - 06/19/12 07:48 AM
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Thanks psonice.
I've known Intel speed grading for a long time (and the pricing difference due to that) since many Pentium generations. For this minor speed improvement (and more importantly 1MB extra cache) and change the CPU name from i5 to i7 with a big mark up, IMHO, is wrong.
Being fooled once, shame on me.
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