I7 740qm vs Quad core Q9550

[cyberman86]

I'm going to sell my desktop which has a Q9550 @ 2.8ghz processor to buy a laptop because its easier to carry. I order an Hp Envy with i7 740Qm processor 1.7ghz-2.9ghz

Is there a big difference in performance between those 2 processors?
for example Rendering and Gaming? how much difference?

 

[ignoranceabound]

Yes but it's still a laptop and gaming will still suck compared to desktops. The i7 is much faster but it's a first generation chip so the turbo is not on all cores. It should still be much faster per clock and play games better than the desktop CPU.

For your desktop gaming the Q9550 with a GTX 460 will destroy any laptop out there short of a GTX 485M.

Laptop gaming should be restricted to WOW for the most part unless you don't care about graphics.

For the price of a high end laptop you can buy a desktop, laptop and maybe even a netbook.

 

[cyberman86]

what about rendering? let say something takes 10 min to render in the Q9550 how much time will take to render the same thing in the i7 740qm?

 

[ignoranceabound]

Much faster primarily due to hyperthreading.

 

[hunter315]

Depends on what you are rendering and whether it can make use of a large number of cores, and if it uses GPU acceleration. You arent getting a desktop level CPU in a laptop, i would say on average the i7 would be slightly faster, its lower clock speed in multi threaded applications hurts it significantly.

If you are considering gaming you need to be more concerned with the graphics card than the CPU, if its packing low level integrated graphics it doesnt matter how good the CPU is it wont game well.