Thinkpads Forum

Would an X220 with the fastest cpu be much faster than my X201 with an i5 520M at things like Lightroom? I alreadyy have 8gb and an SSD.

It depends on what you're doing, but anything where you're pushing the CPU, the X220, particularly the i7s, should give a nice performance bump. Now, for Office and Internet, they'll probably seem the same. The i7 X220 tend to be a bit more noisy, so you can't have it all.

ZaZ wrote:It depends on what you're doing, but anything where you're pushing the CPU, the X220, particularly the i7s, should give a nice performance bump. Now, for Office and Internet, they'll probably seem the same. The i7 X220 tend to be a bit more noisy, so you can't have it all.

Yeah, Lightroom is fairly CPU intensive. I'm just wondering if a 5 second process time would become snappy and near instant, or if it would be more of a 5 second process time would become a 4 second process time.

The latter.

Would the CPUs in the bigger laptops make it snappy? Like the i7-4600U? Or the i7-4900MQ, or are the gains just not that big anymore?

If you are looking for 2X improvement - you can forget it, of course. There are typically ~10% improvements per generation. It does accumulate, but even 3 generations will get you only to ~40% faster, tops.

In day to day tasks, the improvement is hardly noticeable.

When looking at quad-core CPUs, like the 4900MQ, there will be a big improvement in tasks that can utilize more than 2 cores, but most day-to-day tasks are not among them.

The i7-4600U is two generations ahead of the X220, so it will be faster than most X220 CPUs. It is approximately on par with the i7-2640M, which is the fastest CPU available in the X220, and it does so at much lower clock speeds, much lower power consumption (which translates to longer battery life) and heat generation.

To be clear, I'm not worried about most day to day tasks, just Lightroom and Photoshop.

Quickness is more related to the hard drive. The CPU is more brute strength. A quad core should be significantly faster if that's what you're after.

The processing speed of Lightroom is determined by the HDD? I already have an SSD anyway.

Laptops are (currently) two core all across the range so the difference within a generation isn't that much to begin with. Maybe comparing an i3 from the first generation to a i7 from the fourth would feel considerable, but i5 from the first and i5 from the second is unlikely to make much difference.

If you're after raw performance just build a desktop. Some people think they need a lot of power on the go but laptops aren't really meant for serious work. They are not very ergonomic for extended periods of usage for example. Much easier IMO to just plan ahead and get into the habit of returning to your desktop than to try to do the same outside. A desktop is likely to be much faster for the same amount of cash. And if you somehow run out of gas, it's much easier just to pop in a new CPU / motherboard / RAM / Video card in and keep the monitor, keyboard, mouse, case, PSU, DVD, webcam, memory card reader, hard drive, etc. Mine had an i3 2100T and now has a i5 3550. For 80 bucks it feels like a different machine.

The money you save gives you a free X201. Cool huh?