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

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

We've been waiting for Intel's desktop Broadwell CPUs to land for some time. With the industry already gearing up for Skylake with hardware and press events on the cards in the next few weeks, Broadwell may fade away into obscurity before it even lands in our lab for a review.

It's a decidedly interesting addition to Intel's line-up, though, with low power consumption and even more importantly, vastly improved IGP performance if early benchmarks are anything to go by.

This is perhaps most interesting to laptop owners, with the Iris Pro mobile CPUs promising good GPU performance coupled with the increased performance and power-conserving properties of Broadwell itself. Today, we'll be taking a look at the 2D performance of Intel's low end quad-core mobile CPU - the Core i7-5700HQ, which has just started appearing in laptops from the likes of Aorus and MSI.

This particular model lacks the Iris Pro 6200 graphics of its more powerful siblings, stretching up to the Core i7-5950HQ so it's pretty pointless testing the on-board HD graphics, Still, though, it sports four cores and eight theads so is the direct sucessor to the likes of the Core i7-4700HQ. With a TDP of 47W, it's a fair bit more power hungry than the dual core parts that have been doing the rounds for a while now, such as the Core i7-5500U, with the latter sporting a TDP of just 15W.


There's quite a bit of variation across the board in terms of frequency and the integrated graphics. The Core i7-5700HQ lacks the Iris Pro of 6200 which is included with the rest of the quad-core parts and uses Intel HD 5600 graphics instead. The top-end IGP also makes an appearance with the dual-parts too, with the Core i7-5557U offering Iris Pro 6100 graphics, while the rest use variations on the standard Intel HD graphics.

The base frequency of the Core i7-5700HQ sits at 2.7GHz and turbos up to 3.5GHz, although a lot will obviously depend on a laptop's ability to prevent throttling, especially with a quad-core part, and the Core i7-5700HQ has exactly the same TDP as the Core i7-4700HQ too. There's also a small difference in Level 3 cache too, with the quad-core part sporting 6MB and the dual-core Core i7's offering 4MB.

This falls to 3MB for the vast majority of the rest of the Broadwell line-up's Core i5 and Core i3s, so while a Core i5-5300U might be faster in terms of core frequency than the Core i7-5550U, the latter has an extra megabyte of Level 3 cache and also has HD 6000 rather than HD 5500 graphics.

Test Setup

We've included results from both past and present to get an idea of where the Core i7-5700HQ fits in by looking at several previously-reviewed laptops and Intel NUC's, as well as comparing this spritely CPU with its desktop counterparts. As such, we don't have all our CPU results in all the graphs but a fairly clear picture should be presented nonetheless. We've also highlighted other mobile CPUs in green.

We've used MSI's new PE60 2QE laptop as our test bed for the Core i7-5700HQ, which retails for £898 at Scan, and comes equipped with a GeForce GTX 960M and 8GB DDR3 RAM.

Head over the page to see the benchmarks.