Why is my mobile i7 slower than my C2Q?

[nkarasch]

I just bought a Samsung Series 7 with an i7 3615M. Being a true nerd, the first thing I did was test it with SuperPi (single core), 1m digits took 34 seconds. My Q6600 @ stock speeds takes 23, my 4.5ghz i5 takes 8.

I did a search and other people were puzzled by that as well, everyone said a mobile i7 should destroy a C2Q. Is something wrong? What could be causing this? I put it in performance mode in the power options.

Edit: I just ran 3DMark 06 and immediately after ran SuperPi again and 1M digits completed in 11 seconds. What is causing this?

 

[yyk71200]

Use CPU-Z to find out if CPU goes to full speed from idle. Also monitor temperatures. If it goes too hot, it will trottle.

 

[DarkOutlaw]

+1 for throttling

 

[rgd1101]

High performance mode could still mean min 5% to 100% max. Check the advance settings.

 

[Collywozzle]

Agreed, almost certainly throttling. Laptops very often do this. - e.g. idle it may sit there at 20% of capacity or something. There are power options to adjust this (may vary )

They also throttle when hot as previous poster said - happens all the time. You may notice when you play games that take a lot of grunt that after a while your fps will drop significantly. Thats your CPU slowing down because its over heating. If it continues to heat the computer will shut down as a safety mechanism.

I have my laptop sat permanently on a fan base to help with this issue. (quite an old laptop, to be fair..)

 

[nkarasch]

It is odd that it was slow after idling for a long time and fast after being pushed to its limits...I'll get CPU-Z and watch it while doing various tasks.

It only has the 630m, hopefully it isn't a heat monster since it definitely isn't a performance monster.

Thanks for the input, my last laptop had a Athlon XP @ 1.2 ghz so this is pretty foreign to me.

 

[Collywozzle]

Oddly enough I've also experienced some programs failing to trigger the cpu to go into "full power" mode (notably flash it seems...) - That could easily just be my laptop, but it may explain why it didnt kick in properly for superpi. The only fix I have there is to set your cpu to always run at a high level.

Then, after it had finished with 3dmark it will still be running at high capacity and was therefore faster.

That is mostly speculation. Monitoring the speed is the best idea! - Also try doing it after changing the minimum core speed to see the effect, and try superpi after that