i7-640m overkill for basic use? Should I swap to an ES i7-620m?

[lucino]

Hi, picked up a laptop cheap as it had a faulty touchpad (cable came loose lol) which has an i7-640m 2.8 - 3.4Ghz installed.

I think I know the answer to this but for basic tasks (no major number crunching or video editing) is this cpu overkill?

I ask because I have an i7-620m ES 2.4 - 3Ghz which I could swap into the laptop, and probably on-sell the 640m for more than what I paid for the laptop

I will be keeping this as a second laptop as it's got a 13"screen so might be good to travel with.

If it's a case that there might be a noticable difference I will probably keep the 640m but wanted opinions if its only a marginal difference.

Oh the other parts in the laptop are not a bottleneck- have ssd, plenty of ram, gpu etc etc

Thanks!

[DEagleson]

A i3 330 should be more than enough for basic tasks like watching YouTube, browsing the net or writing something with Office, so yeah you got a nice overkill.
I mean if you could sell of that extra CPU for profit, then why not.
Then you can buy a nice mouse to replace that faulty touchpad.

My stepdad has a eMachines with a i3 330 & ATI Radeon HD 5470m and the only thing slow about that notebook is the 5400rpm HDD.
Replacing it with a budget priced SSD would make it blazing fast.

[lucino]

Cool thanks for the reply, yes I think I will go ahead and swap the cpu for the slower one, seems unlikely I will max it out id say.

[Charles P. Jefferies]

Swapping the CPU out and selling it sounds like a great idea. Good for you, finding a cheap laptop and turning it around!

For most common uses (office productivity, HD video, web surfing), a Core 2 Duo from 2007 would work beautifully. And the i7-640M dual-core is much more advanced than that. It should fetch a good price given it's the fastest dual-core CPU of its generation.

[lucino]

I was quite lucky with this one, it was advertised cheap as the touchpad was faulty, when I pulled it apart the touchpad ribbon cable had just come loose from the plug, easiest fix ever!

Defo going to pull the 640m now, your both right that the 620m should do me, thanks!

[kobe_24]

You should know the answer to your question, considering you own the laptop in your signature. The laptop in your signature has almost the identical specifications as the one I’m using, and you know if it can handle just about anything, then certainly a 620M (maybe same as x9100@3.6GHz in single applications), which is not that much slower than the 640M you’re replacing it with.

Heck, I’ve had my brother’s computer now a few days testing it and it does just about everything my computer does at the same speed on average. His computer has a Pentium M 2.26; 2MB RAM and a Geforce 6800U GO.

If you happen to sell your 640M, please ask in one of the sub forums what you can get for it, and if it is not too much I’ll take it off your hands.

[DEagleson]

Originally Posted by lucino

I was quite lucky with this one, it was advertised cheap as the touchpad was faulty, when I pulled it apart the touchpad ribbon cable had just come loose from the plug, easiest fix ever!

Defo going to pull the 640m now, your both right that the 620m should do me, thanks!

Damn, thats clever.
Congratulations on a fully functional notebook then.

[lucino]

Thanks all, well plans on hold for the moment- seems the Dell bios doesn't like ES chips... 4 hours and 3 different ES cpu's later I've had to swap back in the 640m.

Might start a thread in the Dell forum to see if anyone else has struck this problem, these ES chips all work perfectly in Acer laptops, but in the Dell they cause the o/s to freeze no matter what I try boohoo....