AVADirect's Clevo B5130M: GeForce GT 425M with a 15.6" 1080p Chaser
by Dustin Sklavos on November 23, 2010 12:00 AM ESTApplication Performance: the i7-640M vs. the i7-720QM
The Clevo B5130M has brought with it an interesting point of contention that AVADirect was graceful enough to let us test: can Intel's fastest mobile dual-core, the i7-640M, outperform their slowest current-generation mobile quad, the i7-720QM? It's something worth exploring, because the 640M can actually be found for a reasonable price online for users daring enough to upgrade their mobile processors. The two are essentially at near price parity, but while the 720QM can turbo up from its nominal 1.6GHz clock to 2.4GHz on two cores and 2.8GHz on one core, the 640M starts at 2.8GHz and hits 3.2GHz on two cores and a blistering 3.46GHz on a single core. Both of these chips are Hyper-Threaded, too.
Ouch. That's actually pretty damning for the i7-720QM. It's only in the most heavily threaded tasks that the quad-core can produce a lead over the i7-640M, and even then the lead isn't exactly commanding. Unless you're certain you can take advantage of the 720QM's four physical and eight logical cores, the 640M may wind up being a better choice more often than not.
As a special bonus round, we took a quick look at hard drive performance to see how the Western Digital Scorpio Black fares against the industry standard Seagate Momentus 7200.4. The Momentus is extremely common and is usually the drive found in notebooks shipping with a 7200RPM hard disk. In testing with HDTune Pro 4.60, we found the performance of the two to be fairly close, with the Scorpio Black producing negligibly faster scores across the board. The exception is burst speed: the Scorpio had a measured 138.7 MB/sec burst speed, nearly 40MB/sec faster than the Seagate. Measured latency was also 1.5ms lower on the Scorpio Black, but at the end of the day we're not sure the drive is ultimately worth the upgrade. Mercifully, it's only four bucks more than the Seagate when configuring from AVADirect, so if you're not keen on going the SSD route and even the Momentus XT is too rich for your blood, the Scorpio Black is a solid alternative.
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JarredWalton - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
Yeah, the base AVADirect model has OS, 500GB HDD, but only 2GB RAM. Setting up equivalent specs XoticPC comes out ahead on this one (though that may always change). In the past, I've compared the two companies and AVADirect always came out ahead, but that's not always the case. Also note that XoticPC appears to charge a bit more on some upgrades, but then AVADirect charges a bit more on others. Not sure on shipping costs or any other factors, but go with whoever gives the better price. :-)gomakeit - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
Since the laptop as configured is $1200 which is mightily close to the Asus G53J that sports a GT460M, I'm wondering what're your thoughts when comparing the two. Is the G53's LCD better than G51 (which was pretty lousy)? I hope you'd do a review on the G53 at some point!gomakeit - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
Of course I meant the non-3D version of the G53 (Newegg prices it at $1450).Rasterman - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
I got my G53 from Amazon last week for 1299 shipped, I have no idea why you would get this Clevo when the G53 exists.Meegulthwarp - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
I was looking for a new laptop to replace my ageing Clevo M860TU (w/ 9600M GT) and this looked like the perfect replacement but I've come away sad. I was really expecting better battery life from this, my biggest complaint with my M860TU is the 2 hour battery life. I was hoping they would improve battery life after 2 years worth of die shrinks and architectural changes. Also the performance numbers don't seem to be much higher than what I'm getting right now not to mention they are 5 - 10 degrees hotter than mine on both idle and load. Can't justify another £1000 purchase just yet it seems.Hrel - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
I wouldn't think you'd be able to justify that purchase until Sandy Bridge. But on the battery life note you can always get an external battery. I got an external Energizer battery, works for all laptops and mp3 players and phones and just about everything. Sure it ads a little bulk but if you carry your laptop around in a bag anyway it's not a problem. And it ads about 6 hours of intensive web surfing to my Dell Studio 1535, on top of the 3 hours I already get.On an aside I agree, I was really expecting better battery life from this. But when you look at load battery life it's comparable to similar systems; I think 3+ hours gaming is pretty darn good. There is an interesting Compal unit over at Cyberpower.com that uses the HD5650 and offers several options. Without OS and with a good CPU you can get it for like 800 bucks, 1080p and all. My friend got one and he plays Civ 5 on it for over 4 hours without needing to plug in. Gaming battery life, I think that's incredible.
TareX - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
I'm impressed by the benchmarks... I'd like to see how it would compare to the Hp Envy 15, which supposedly has a much better GPU (sans Optimus though)SteelCity1981 - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
No doubt that the 640UM is more suited for today's programs then the 720QM as of now. fast speed Dual Core over slower speed Quad Cores are still a lot more favorable with many programs out there, because there are still a lot of programs out there that don't take advantage of Quad Cores yet. But when more and more programs become Quad threaded, the 720QM going to have the advantage every time over the 640UM Dual Core and has more and more programs support Hyperthreading the performance gap will just get wider between the 720QM and 640UM due to the fact that the 720QM has double the amount of Hyperthreading virtual cores then the 640UM does.PlasmaBomb - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
You mean i7 640M - The 640UM is an entirely different processor which runs at 1.2 GHz and Turbos up to 2.26 GHzSteelCity1981 - Thursday, November 25, 2010 - link
Yeah, i mean the 640m not 640UM.