Thinkpads Forum

I like the look of a quad core w510. Say a 720 or 820qm, 8gb ram.
How would performance compare to a typical new cheaper laptop with 4th or 5th gen i5 dual core?
I can't find newish benchmarks for it and the general cpu comparison doesn't look very promising.

Welcome to the forum!

W510 in QC guise still packs plenty of punch, but will run quite a bit warmer and have significantly worse battery life than newer systems.

What's the intended use for the system in the first place?

Thanks. Nothing enormously demanding, just regular use plus some coding, VMs, little bit of simulation.
But i am looking for a laptop that will sit on my desk 99% of the next 3 years so battery unimportant.
Nice to run lots of things at once: a vm open, workspaces, etc. Also i might need more power in the future (studying maths, actuarial, econ. etc.). For a mobile device i could manage on 2 cores but here, power is nice and why not?

W510 pretty cheap but w520 rather a lot more: but seems much more powerful on the benchmarks in reviews: 2720qm w520 can't DOUBLE 720qm w510 performance can it? Surely the gap not THAT big. But average passmark score of 2720qm systems, generally, IS double. Worth the money for future proofing?

fredsmith999 wrote:Worth the money for future proofing?

I'd say "yes".

W520 runs SATA III in the main bay where W510 is still SATA II. The former also has the option of using the WWAN slot for a mSATA boot drive.

If you're going to run VMs a cool-running system would be preferred to prevent throttling, and in that respect W520 wins hands down as well.

My $0.02 only...

Thanks, saving up for the w520, unless i find a cheap t520 first. With quad and discrete graphics would that be as good? (they have cheaper nvidia cards but looks good enough)

fredsmith999 wrote:Thanks, saving up for the w520, unless i find a cheap t520 first. With quad and discrete graphics would that be as good? (they have cheaper nvidia cards but looks good enough)

Well, W520 with QC has 4 RAM slots where T520 only has two...so I'd go with a W, but that's your money to spend...or not.

Take a look at the numbers yourself: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core ... 034.0.html

It is not that "fast" anymore (but still usable for some time to come), and it generates quite alot of heat.