Originally posted by passmark
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For your own PC, a quick lookup of CPU and GPU scores should tell you what a current laptop equal or better than your desktop would be. Offhand though those 3 year-old desktop specs will still be equal or better than all but about the top 5% of laptops.. Quad-core laptops are much slower clock speeds, and only a Radeon 5870M or GeForce 460M or better are faster than a desktop 8800 Ultra.. I'd say unless you are willing to spend $2000 or more on your laptop, forget about beating those desktop specs.
You also need to be aware of all the 'gotchas' - the nuances in CPU and GPU design where designers 'cut corners' to save power or reduce heat - remember that THIS is the primary concern in a laptop, not outright speed. The Core i-series chips use 'Turbo Boost' to advertise a higher clock speed as Intel knows this is what everyone still thinks of as the primary measure of a CPU. But Turbo Boost overclocks only ONE CORE of a dual or quad-core CPU. It also DISABLES the others in the meantime.. so for some software this provides a performance advantage. In others it may have no effect at all, or even adversely impact multi-core applications. So which is better - 1 core at 2.9Ghz, or more than 1 at 2.0Ghz? Unfortunately the answer is not clear-cut A or B. But chip designers started offering multi-core chips specifically because they came to the realization with the Pentium4 that there was a practical limit to how much power PCs could consume, and how much waste heat they could generate. This is why CPU speeds have not ramped up much past ~3.4Ghz for several years now.
Likewise with 'mobile' versions of GPUs. The model-equivalent of a mobile chip often runs at a lower clock speed or slower memory than the desktop version to save power. So a Radeon 5870M does not necessarily equal a desktop PCIe 5870. Many mobile chipsets also have a 'hybrid' mode - high-end discrete video in performance mode, and using an integrated GPU on battery or in power-saving mode.
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