Sandy Bridge vs Ivy Bridge in laptops

[Yuriman]

I recently picked up a Sandy Bridge Celeron (B830) laptop (Asus X401) for free because it needed a hard drive and keyboard. Performance is decent, battery lasts about 4.5 hours which is a lot less than my Haswell Celeron Chromebook (~11 hours) of similar size and specs. I'm considering bumping it up to an i3 or i5 as long as it's not going to murder the battery life, but I haven't yet decided on what chip to buy, if any.

So far as I can tell, all Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge socket G2 chips have a 35w TDP aside from a few i7 QM chips, so it should be safe to swap any dual core for any other, so long as my bios supports it. I'm well aware of the performance as well as TDP vs power consumption differences in desktops, but I don't know how they compare in laptops. It's probably safe to assume any higher clocked chip of a given generation will negatively affect real-world battery life, and Ivy Bridge chips of similar model number (e.g. 2310m vs 3110m) are clocked 1-300mhz higher so they probably offer similar power characteristics, but I have not been able to find any apples-to-apples comparisons.

How much more battery life (both idle and load) can I expect with an IB Celeron (with the same clocks) vs the SB chip that's in it? Roughly how much will moving up to an i3 of similar clock hurt battery life, if at all? How about an i5 which can turbo up to 1000mhz higher?

Sandy Bridge G2 chips are significantly cheaper than Ivy on eBay. It appears I can get a SB i3 for ~$25, an i5 for $28, while an IB Celeron/Pentium is $7, i3 is about $40-45 and an i5 is ~$80. Worth it? What would you get?

 

[razel]

I would not automatically assume that you can use Ivy Bridge in a Sandy Bridge laptop regardless of whether the socket is the same. Even if you did get it to boot and the BIOS does NOT support it, it just means that the BIOS itself cannot throttle the CPU and/or fans without the help of software.

I had a B830 before and currently have a Sandy i3 and an Ivy i5. The B830 has fewer speed bins to choose while some Sandy i7 are nominally low 1.6Ghz but ramp up to 3.0Ghz when allowed. To make matters worse, you may need to buy a more heartier heatsink off ebay that was available for your laptop if an i7 was available at purchase.

It's also very difficult to guesstimate battery life. My current Ivy i5 is a soldered CPU. It is nominally 2.6 (I think) but will oc to 2.9. However when on battery it caps speed to 2ghz. Another Ivy i5 behaves as you would expect. No max cpu speed when on battery.

As a long time laptop owner, it is your screen brightness and health of your battery that will determine your battery life more than anything else. None of that is a satisfactory answer, but it is the facts. My advice is to get lower nominal speed i5 that can ramp up when allowed. Best of luck choosing.

 

[Yuriman]

I would not automatically assume that you can use Ivy Bridge in a Sandy Bridge laptop regardless of whether the socket is the same. Even if you did get it to boot and the BIOS does NOT support it, it just means that the BIOS itself cannot throttle the CPU and/or fans without the help of software.

I had a B830 before and currently have a Sandy i3 and an Ivy i5. The B830 has fewer speed bins to choose while some Sandy i7 are nominally low 1.6Ghz but ramp up to 3.0Ghz when allowed. To make matters worse, you may need to buy a more heartier heatsink off ebay that was available for your laptop if an i7 was available at purchase.

It's also very difficult to guesstimate battery life. My current Ivy i5 is a soldered CPU. It is nominally 2.6 (I think) but will oc to 2.9. However when on battery it caps speed to 2ghz. Another Ivy i5 behaves as you would expect. No max cpu speed when on battery.

As a long time laptop owner, it is your screen brightness and health of your battery that will determine your battery life more than anything else. None of that is a satisfactory answer, but it is the facts. My advice is to get lower nominal speed i5 that can ramp up when allowed. Best of luck choosing.

Thanks Razel. Perhaps I can order one of the $5-7 Ivy Pentiums to see if it'll boot and throttle properly, and then perhaps pull the trigger on an Ivy i3 if it does? $70 is just a bit too much for an Ivy i5. Or, maybe just go with a cheap Sandy i5 and call it a day?

 

[Enigmoid]

Before you do anything double check online if this is possible or if there are BIOS problems and the like.

 

[hhhd1]

Ivy bridge is a huge improvement over sandybridge, when it comes to laptops.

The iGPU is much better, close to double the performance.

Under medium load, power consumption is about 50%.

If the motherboard support it, Ivy bridge is worth it.

 

[Yuriman]

Before you do anything double check online if this is possible or if there are BIOS problems and the like.

I found an account of someone attempting to install an i3 in this particular model, and they claimed it would shut off after 30 minutes. A quick google search reveals the HM70 chipset supports both Sandy and Ivy (bios permitting) but no i3's, i5's or i7's.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2374689

^ A search on here for HM70 returned this thread.

Anywho, given that I can't go higher than a Pentium, I picked a 2.4GHz Ivy Bridge Pentium up for $7 shipped. If I have any problems with turbo and such, I'll try a bios mod.

 

[razel]

Damn! 2.4 Ivy Bridge for $7?!? That's just worth it to gamble and play with, especially if organizing parts for a laptop teardown is a hobby. It's averages me 2-3 hours of careful disassembly/reassembly to get my lappys done.

You'll have a fun weekend. Let us know how it turns out. I plan on upgrading my folk's i3 Sandy soon. Going from i3 Sandy 2.1 to i5 Sandy 2.3 --turbo-> 2.9 will cost me $35.

 

[Dufus]

@Yuriman you might find this thread useful. http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/asus-x401a-upgrade-to-ultrabook-status.682599/

 

[mikeymikec]

Considering I once tried to upgrade a Sandy Bridge desktop PC with an Ivy Bridge CPU that it officially supported with the correct BIOS update and it wouldn't POST (the CPU worked fine in another board, and the SB board works fine with its SB generation CPU), I would consider "all bets to be off" personally.