The first test of a mobile Core i7 processor has been performed by PC Pro and it looks like we’ve got a lot to look forward to. It seems like Intel has managed to combine  performance and good battery life.

The processor on test is the quad-core Core i7-820QM which is clocked at 1.73GHz and has 8MB of L2 cache. The test system used 4GB of DDR3 1,333MHz memory and was fitted with a GeForce GT240M graphics card. It also had a 16-inch display, but no other details were revealed with regards to the system specifications, although it did use a 7,200rpm hard drive rather than an SSD as to compare apples to apples with the other notebooks it was put up against.

What impresses is the fairly decent battery life under light load, as the test system managed over three and a half hours on a fairly average 4,800mAh battery. That might not be a Core 2 Duo T6600, although that test system did have a more basic and less power hungry graphics card.

It’s hard to draw too many conclusions from the PC Pro benchmarks, as they use their own in-house test which can’t easily be compared with real world application tests, but overall performance seem quite impressive and the Core i7 system excelled in the encoding test, beating the older and hotter Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9300 CPU in a system with twice as much RAM and an Nvidia Quadro graphics card.

However, the Core i7 system didn’t outperform the Core 2 Extreme system in the multi-tasking test which seems odd, although as the Core i7 is clocked slower by some 800MHz, it’s still an impressive result. The Core 2 Extreme was also faster in the office test and neck and neck in the 2D test.

With notebooks you always have to make trade-offs, but it seems like the mobile Core i7 has found a reasonable balance between performance and battery life for those that want a machine than can offer both. In saying that, PC Pro did note that under heavy load, the battery only lasted 46 minutes, but most people don’t run very CPU intensive tasks while on the move.

You can find the early benchmark figures and some additional information here