It's not useful to discuss "i7" without pinning down the nomenclature of the chip. You need that to identify the chip and to understand its capabilities. The numbers and suffix indicate generation, number of cores, features the chip may or may not have, power consumption, clock speeds, etc. This will tell you also what socket you need on your mobo, what sorts of RAM are supported, and more. At least, the nomenclature will tell you that when you plug it into a search engine and find all that info on the chip.