• We hope you have a fantastic holiday season to close out 2025! Thank you all so much for being part of the Tom's Guide community!

Solved! Same question I hear all the time; clock vs series

randomstar

Distinguished
May 2, 2007
120
1
18,660
I am a bit confused, really. Knowing that the SB cpu are faster, the i7 is better, all that..
for a general purpose , CAD and light/Medium Gaming Notebook- Is it really better to go for i7 say, 740 (low clock speed) vs an i5 higher clock?
I know that in a perfect world where everything utilized multi-thread and all that, the i7 would be obvious. but we dont live in that world, do we?
 
Image/video editing apps along with some games that benefit from multi-core CPUs, benefit from a quad core CPU.
 
Solution
to OP
In multi-threaded apps/games yes.
to anort3
The review is for desktop CPUs;whereas,the OP is asking about mobile CPUs. :)
 




Oops should have noticed that. 😗