P8400 vs T9500

[tonytnnt]

Alright, so I was very surprised by this article which on the first page has a list of laptop CPUs in terms of performance. I'll quote since it's getting Slashdotted:

Some solutions use lower end cards, but combine two of them using SLI technology. CPUs are another concern, and again, should be similar to laptops beyond this price point. The appropriate models include (in order of performance, ascending):

Core 2 Duo T8300
Core 2 Duo T7800
Core 2 Extreme X7800
Core 2 Duo T9300
Core 2 Extreme X7900
Core 2 Duo T9500
Core 2 Extreme X9000
Core 2 Duo P8400
Core 2 Duo P8600
Core 2 Duo P9500
Core 2 Duo T9400
Core 2 Duo T9600
Core 2 Duo X9100

For reference the T9500 is a 2.6 GHz chip with an 800 MHz FSB, and 6 MB of L2 cache.
The P8400 is a 2.26 GHz chip with a 1066 MHz FSB and 3 MB of L2 cache.

For raw performance (so don't take into account any battery life improvements like a lower TDP) wouldn't the T9500 perform better? Or is the performance increase actually from the newer northbridge the Montevina chips use?

Also, as an aside (hijacking my own thread?), does anyone know the battery life difference between a T9500 and one of the newer Centrino 2 setups? I've got a choice to make here soon between getting a laptop with a T9500, a Quadro nvs 140, 4 gigs of ram, and a 160 GB HDD (with free fall sensor), with a 4 year in home warranty (Dell, which I've had great experiences with in the past on my current D600) for ~$1200, or something else. I'm really torn because I mostly do surfing, some video transcoding (MPEG-2 to MP4 on external HDDs) and gaming (I don't need my graphics at the highest settings -- I really just want the games to run) but at the same time there's no way I can configure a laptop similarly for less (mostly because of the processor.) Ahhh!

Anyways, back to the main question, so which is better, a P8400 or a T9500 in terms of absolute performance? Is the referenced article correct in it's CPU hierarchy?

 

[robvas]

(Ancient thread revival)

I swapped my P8400 (2.4GHz, 3MB L2) for a T9400 (2.53GHz, 6MB L2) and kept everything else the same (Samsung 250GB SSD, 8GB of PC-8500 DDR3) and saw a pretty big improvement in a compilation benchmark (make -j2 on nmap-6.25) - 46 seconds to 53 seconds, that's only .13 GHz more clockspeed but the larger cache is the big help.

That's about 15% improvement. Will be testing a T9600 when I get home (2.8GHz, 6MB L2).

edit: 43 seconds for the T9600 - 7% faster than the T9400.

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

The Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T9400 is the better of the two processors.