As we’ve previously mentioned, we are rapidly phasing in 5th Gen Intel Core i7 Broadwell CPUs across our range instead of the previously used 4th Gen Haswell CPU – as seen below. On paper, the differences between the CPUs mainly used aren’t very large – they’re of similar specifications, same power levels (47W TDP), and support the same kind of things. In fact, the biggest differences comes down to the i7-5700HQ Broadwell chip having a 100MHz higher base frequency, as well as a 100MHz lower boost frequency than its predecessor, the i7-4720HQ, as well as support for 1866MHz RAM, as opposed to 1600MHz. For casual users, Intel are steadily improving its graphics solutions, so Broadwell comes with Intel HD Graphics 5600, whereas the Haswell offering comes with HD 4600. With everything looking very similar specification-wise, we decided to take the CPUs for a head to head spin in a few benchmark applications, the first of which was the CPU test Cinebench R15. The benchmark utilizes all CPU threads, and both our CPUs have 4 cores and 8 threads. We ran the benchmark three times on each CPU, both with dual channel memory, and recorded the results as seen above. Clearly, the newcomer is a big step up, with a consistent performance over 10% higher than that of the older i7-4720HQ. This is fairly impressive, considering the fact that the i7-4720HQ is actually able to perform at a 100MHz higher boost frequency than the i7-5700HQ. The Broadwell CPU absolutely walks away with the victory in Cinebench, the first of our benchmarks we’re looking at over the upcoming few weeks.
