Maximum PC

Yeah I know, way wrong place to ask, as this the home of power users

However, after having a 17" laptop in my lap, and then my wife's new 14" laptop I have come to the conclusion, that I can live(quite well apparently) with only a 14" screen. So the question becomes this, since performance is #1, and it does not appear that any 2.0ghz+ non-turbo 4 core mobile processors are coming out anytime soon, is a dual core i5 @ 2.66ghz going to perform faster than a 4 core i7 @ 1.86 ghz, in apps that require a min dual core proc, or apps that don't care about the number of cores? I intend to run anything I buy for a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time. Probably well beyond design life, whatever the hell that is for laptops...

Of course then the graphics comes into play, but it looks like I can get a gt335m 1gb i7 only (Xoticpc), or gt420m 1gb(Dell) with an i5. The i7 would be a gt425m 2gb(Dell).

I will consider a 15" notebook, but if it is much bigger than 14.75"l x 10"w I don't think I want to do it. This thing is going to spend a bunch of time in my lap(can't believe I haven't discovered the joys of mobile computing before now ) and the 17" laptop I have kinda sucks. Of course when it is equal to 5% of my own weight, it's not gonna be fun is it...

Planned use for laptop(and based on my experience with the software I intend to run it should be just fine):

car ECU tuning/datalogging
CAD/CAM
games(Civ IV/V mostly)
internet
e-mail
playing video/music

CAD/CAM really benefits from 4 cores, but everything else you listed would be better off with two faster cores, so it depends how often you use CAD programs and how much you value good performance in whatever CAD app you use.

All the CAD/CAM software I am looking at does not seem to benefit from multiple cores. It doesn't specify that it will utilize them, and certainly does not say it requires 2 cores like Civ V.