Solved! Intel Corei5 or i7 turbo boost?

[TheBigSmooth]

Ok so im in the process of buying a laptop and i found 3 that are great in my prince range. But i need some help.

What is turbo boost? And is there a difference between the i5 and i7 turbo boost?

Here are the laptops tell me what i should get and why?

http/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215205
Core i5-2430M 2.40 6GB Ram
$729.99

http/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215198
Core i7-2670QM 2.2 4GB Ram
$749.99

http/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215197
Core i5-2430M 2.40 4GB Ram
$579.99

Honestly that bottom one is a steal but im looking for a true quad core. Will the i7 with its 2x L3cashe make a difference. im really lost with all of this. Please help

 

[ulillillia]

Turbo boost is minor automatic overclocking on one of the cores when CPU-demanding tasks are encountered. If several cores are used, turbo boost won't be as effective. Laptops are far from my realm of expertise (I have but 20 total hours of use versus tens of thousands on desktops) so I can't answer those questions.

 

[TheBigSmooth]

but it has 4 cores!!!

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been moved from the section CPU & Components to section Laptops & Notebooks by Mousemonkey

 

[zhihao50]

The main advantage of some i7 over i5 is it have 4 physical core and hyperthread where as i5 and the "lower powered" i7 only has 2 core and hyperthread.
If you use a lot of program that are well threaded and can take advantage of more core then the i7 will be faster.

It depends on whats your intended use? what kind of program you want to run?

 

[geofelt]

but it has 4 cores!!!

If you run multi threaded apps, then 4 cores is an advantage.

Few games use more than two or three cores.

Normal desktop usage is perfectly happy with two cores. Actually, the i5-2430M also has hyperthreading which gives you two extra tasks that make use of residual cycles in the two cores. Think of them as the addition of 1/4 of a core each.

Also, the more cores you have, the less powerful each core can be and still be within thermal and power limits. It is a trade off. With turbo boost, if you are running a single cpu intensive task, the cpu can go faster(turboboost) since the power for the other core is not needed. It is a good thing.

For the most part, ignore l1/l2/l3 cache as a selection criteria. It is an appropriate amount for the cpu, and is already factored into the capability ranking of the cpu.