tokala
Emperor
1. At best, the i7 will be slightly faster: if CiV scales almost perfectly with the core number, you will get about 30% performance increase, thats "just noticable".What laptop CPU will be best for Civ V: i5 2,4 GHz (dual) or i7 1,6 GHz (quad)?
However, there are two scenarios where the i5 might be significantly faster:
2. CiV scales not very good with >2 cores
3. CiV will scale quite well up to 4 cores but not more, and won't mind very much if it's a physical or logical core.
So far very few games would fall into category 1.
If none of those scenarios are valid for CiV, you will probably feel no difference between the two processors.