I have the option to buy an i7 720QM or a i5 540M and in every benchmark list I see the i7 outperforms the i5 but I really don't see why. Yes, the i7 is a quad, but it runs only at 1.6GHz and even with turbo mode it only goes up to 2.8GHz, while the i5 is clocked at 2.5GHz and can go up to 3.3GHz. The only noticeable advantage I see is that the i7 has 6MB cache while the i5 is limited to 3MB.