What is does turbo mean?

[marksmith156]

Hi,

I'm looking at buying a laptop.

Narrowed my choice down to 2.

Is the 2nd one worth the extra money (considering the architecture is older)?

I'm also a bit confused as Dell claims 'The fastest mobile processor on the planet!' for both options...

I'm also especially confused by the 'turbo up to 2.8GHz' part. What does this mean? Will it run that fast only for short periods of time? Would this laptop by able to play 1080p H264 video over a prolonged period of time?

Thanks for any advice.

Option 1
Intel® Core™ i7-720QM Mobile Processor (1.6GHz, turbo up to 2.8GHz,
6MB L3 Cache)
4096MB 1333MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM [2x2048]
320GB (7,200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive
Cost: £699

Option 2
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor P8700 (2.53Ghz, 3MB, 1066MHz)
6144MB 800MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [1x4096 + 1x2048]
500GB (5.400rpm) SATA Hard Drive
Cost: £799

Link for more info:
http://www1.euro.dell.com/uk/en/home/Laptops/laptop-studio-1555/pd.aspx?refid=laptop-studio-1555&s=dhs&cs=ukdhs1

 

[buwish]

Sure, either would be able to handle HD content, depending of course on the graphics chip included. What are they? In regard to the turbo option, essentially it is when the processor overclocks itself for a short time to handle extra work load or a program that requires more clock speed. It doesn't run that fast all of the time, just when needed.

 

[Kari]

It doesn't run that fast all of the time, just when needed.

and if it's needed to run that fast all of the time, it will

 

[marksmith156]

and if it's needed to run that fast all of the time, it will

Unless it starts to overheat (presumably)?

 

[Kari]

Unless it starts to overheat (presumably)?

well yeah, if it's too hot the turbo wont kick in, so i'd guess it works both ways

 

[das_stig]

Turbo means that unused cores are temp. turned off and the remaining cores auto-overclock.

For the money your going to pay, get yourself HP DV7-3020ea i7 quad core. (£891 eBuyer.com)

I should know, I bought one for Christmas to replace my desktop.

 

[sminlal]

I'm also especially confused by the 'turbo up to 2.8GHz' part.

The idea is that heat is the limiting factor on how fast the CPU can run - the faster the clock, the higher the heat. As you can imagine, a four-core processor produces almost 4X as much heat as an equivalent 1-core processor. But if you used only 1 core, you could run it faster and still produce less heat than the 4-core processor.

A 4-core CPU is rated at a certain clock speed (say, 2.6GHz) to be able to run at that speed with all 4 cores active all day and all night (assuming your heatsink and cooling fan are working properly). But if the CPU isn't running multiple things at the same time and, say, only 1 core is active then it will produce less heat. "Turbo" mode takes advantage of that by allowing the clock frequency to increase under those conditions.

What it does is let a single-threaded program run faster than it would otherwise be able to as long as there's nothing else going on at the same time.

 

[Guest]

I have my own question. I have been look

 

[amdfangirl]

Simple answer, just get the first option mate.

It runs cooler, longer battery life an it does HD video.