Intel Core i7-5700HQ: Quad-core Broadwell Comes to Laptops

Performance Analysis

Our performance numbers for the mobile CPUs shouldn't be taken as gospel and this is for several reasons. The mobile CPUs were installed in a variety of laptops and/or low power devices, which had differing configurations. For this reason, we haven't undertaken any 3D tests such as games and most of these devices had different discrete GPUs. There is however, a variation in the memory speed and configuration used that result in a slight discrepancy between the results, so they should be used for reference only.

In addition, laptops tend to throttle their CPUs, even when the power adaptor is plugged in if they get too hot and we saw this applied fairly agressively with some of the Intel Core i7-4720HQ results, which were noticeably slower than the Intel Core i7-5700HQ in one or two tests, particularly Terragen 3, which has a sustained high CPU load.

Despite this, though, the Intel Core i7-5700HQ was an even match, even for the Intel Core i7-4800MQ (highlighted in green with the rest of the mobile CPUs for comparison), which has a 200MHz higher Turbo frequency. In the Media Benchmarks it came out top and was fairly similar in performance to Intel's Core i5 desktop quad cores such as the Core i5-4670K. It was a similar story in the PCMark 8 tests too - the improved IPC was clear with an advantage in the photo editing test but the video editing test had the Intel Core i7-4720HQ being slightly ahead, most likely due to the latter's slightly higher Turbo frequency.


Thanks to the addition of hyper-threading, the Intel Core i7-5700HQ was able to topple desktop quad-cores such as the Core i5-4670K convincingly in Cinebench R15 so it makes a good case for using laptops such as MSI's PE60 2QE as desktop replacements. However, hyper-threaded models in Intel's arsenal such as the Core i7-4790K are still far more powerful, even more so if you've overclocked them as the results in Terragen 3 and Cinebench show.

Conclusion

We're solely focussing on 2D performance here and the Intel Core i7-5700HQ has proven itself to be a worthy successor to its Haswell-based predecessors. It was consistently faster than similar CPUs of the previous generation and even pipped faster ones to the post too. It and its siblings look set to take over at the premium end of the market so hopefully this will also lead to good deals on devices that currently offer the older Haswell-based CPUs. This leaved you with the inevitable choice of opting for the newer, faster hardware or previous generation kit at a discounted price.

We'd like to thank MSI for loaning us its Prestige PE60 2QE laptop for this review.