I'm still rocking an M4400 with QX9300 (not as my main laptop).Bunkhouse wrote: ↑CPU performance increases have been at a standstill over the past 3-4 years. The benefit of the newer CPUs are that they consume less power at idle and have better integrated GPU's. If you need 4+ hours of battery and better graphics then a newer laptop will do (for a much higher price). But for general browsing, email, etc, these laptops are great for the price. I`m currently using an x230 with 8gb ram plus ssd and find it hard to justify buying anything new given the overall performance difference would be barely noticeable.
T530: Core i5-3320M @ 2.60GHz 3995 Passmark score
T560: Core i5-6200U @ 2.30GHz 3903 Passmark score
T560: Core i7-6500U @ 2.50GHz 4349 Passmark score
Main driver is an M4700 with i7-3740QM (8397 Passmark).
i7-4750HQ is at 8226 Passmark, and i7-6700HQ is at 8016 Passmark. I don't even know what's going on there with Intel. They've added new instruction sets for codec and mining...but it seems that for general computing, the i7 700-series are stuck at 8000-ish Passmark.