Please help me pick a CPU!

[krisz93]

Hi everyone, I'm planning to buy a laptop and i was able to narrow down the possibilities to 2.
Their price and features are almost identical.

4GB RAM
GeForce GT 630M card with 1 GB
750 Gb HDD
Same screen size, resolution etc.


The only difference is their CPU, I'm no expert so I'll need your help in this.

One has the i5-3210M (Ivy Bridge)
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i5-3210M-Notebook-Processor.74458.0.html

The other is the i7-2630QM
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i7-2630QM-Notebook-Processor.41483.0.html


Which one would be better for gaming purposes?
Thanks in advance!

 

[bwrlane]

In both cases, the GPU will be the bottleneck, not the CPU. In a non-GPU limited scenario (ie if you had a faster graphics card), it's a tough call. Considering the suitability for gaming:

For the Ivy i5: Plus - new architecture, slightly faster at a given clock speed, slightly faster turbo speed. Minus - only 2 cores.

For the Sandy i7: Plus - Quad core CPU - this will have some impact in modern games because some can use more than 2 threads. Minus - slightly lower clockspeeds and performance at a given clock speed.

For applications that are both CPU limited and multi-threaded, the SB processor will be far, far faster.