I am very suspicious of the benchmarks that you pointed to. Maybe some users are reporting erroneous data? Take a look at the Passmark list here: http://www.cp

I am very suspicious of the benchmarks that you pointed to. Maybe some users are reporting erroneous data? Take a look at the Passmark list here: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php The i5 scores in at 7995, and the i7 4960HQ is 9770. If you are really CPU bound, there are going to be some big advantages for the i7 here. Of course, if performance is so bad on the Windows machine that it is nearly unusable, then there is probably something else causing the issue.