My son is looking to purchase a laptop for university with the option of an i5 7300HQ or i7 7700HQ for £63 more. He will be using Virtualbox, Photoshop, Microsoft Office and coding applications for his second and final year. On Virtualbox, he will be running one virtual machine (Windows, Linux, Kali, etc) at a time for his assignments/projects to setup, configure and testing stuff in the OS, maybe more but he will probably won't be using Virtualbox after he graduates so do you think the i5 7300HQ will be enough for his needs and gaming or go for the i7 7700HQ for £63 more, what do you think?
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i5 or i7 for university?
- Thread starter Swiftz
- Start date
So the difference is:
i5 7300HQ - 2.5 GHz, 3.5 GHz boost, 4 cores 4 threads
i7 7700HQ - 2.8 GHz base, 3.8 GHz boost, 4 cores 8 threads (due to hyperthreading), also 10% higher clocked integrated graphics
I'd say the clockspeed increase, and hyperthreading, is enough to justify the extra spend. Virtualbox and Photoshop will benefit from hyperthreading, meaning the i7 could be some 40% faster than the i5 in such scenarios.
i5 7300HQ - 2.5 GHz, 3.5 GHz boost, 4 cores 4 threads
i7 7700HQ - 2.8 GHz base, 3.8 GHz boost, 4 cores 8 threads (due to hyperthreading), also 10% higher clocked integrated graphics
I'd say the clockspeed increase, and hyperthreading, is enough to justify the extra spend. Virtualbox and Photoshop will benefit from hyperthreading, meaning the i7 could be some 40% faster than the i5 in such scenarios.
Soldato
Well worth the extra £60 for the additional threads and higher clocked CPU.
Soldato
If you don't need to buy now, hold fire for Zen to come out and see if there are any Zen laptop chips coming shortly. If nothing else competition may lower prices somewhat.
Soldato
I5 + monitor.
Soldato
You are joking, right?
Andi.
This is the route I would go if possible.
Nothing worse than trying to get things done cramped up on a small laptop screen. A monitor will help a great deal when having multiple applications/web pages open.
Soldato
I'd grab the i7 and get a monitor asap
Deleted member 66701
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Deleted member 66701
Yeah, visual studio will be mega fun on a dual core.
OP - i7 all the way - although I'd echo another poster, wait for Ryzen and see what happens to prices.
Suffice maybe but if you are say compiling some coursework with office and an image editing program open and referring to coding or other work as part of that then atleast a quad core would make things less tedious.
When was the last time you ever saw a student post on here stating they wished they had bought the next processor up for their coursework? From how the OP put it I don't think we are talking a PHDer doing a deep learning project etc.
Money on better desk, chair, monitor, SSD > processor tbh. Building the 18 year old a _gaming_ rig isn't going to help his grades is it?
He will be running one virtual machine at a time, the i7 will still benefit more than the i5?
He will need it within 1-2 weeks for university.
He is doing a networking and cyber security course.
He has a 24" monitor already that he can use to hook up his laptop.
For £63 extra I'd go for the i7 if it's a small ish price gap I'd always go for the better CPU.
However I completed a computer science degree using a similar software set as in the OP. The i5 would be more than enough for the course, personally I'd look for a good pcie storage and at least 16gb ram (saw someone talking about VMs, ram will have more of an impact than the CPU here) if you can get the i5 system and up the ram or storage speeds I'd definitely recommend that over the better CPU.
However I completed a computer science degree using a similar software set as in the OP. The i5 would be more than enough for the course, personally I'd look for a good pcie storage and at least 16gb ram (saw someone talking about VMs, ram will have more of an impact than the CPU here) if you can get the i5 system and up the ram or storage speeds I'd definitely recommend that over the better CPU.
The laptop has 16GB DDR4 2133MHz RAM and I will give him my spare 500GB Samsung 850 Evo drive that I bought in the sales and use the 120GB SSD that comes in his laptop for my gaming drive.
Then realistically the i5 would be fine (the i7 would just be a little something extra) I would say after knowing the above the battery life difference i5 - i7 would swing it for me.
The only thing in network and cyber security I can think of that would be really CPU intensive is some databases operations or server stress testing but they are all server side. If he was compiling normal stuff again the i5 would be more than adequate, unless he was compiling a full OS (Android / chromium from source) but that's not advisable on a laptop anyway.
I'm a software developer who uses visual studio etc.
Go with the i7 as it's more future proof, it will help with virtual machines and who knows he might do some parallel programming using neutal nets in his final year.
I had a 80486 with 6MB for my computer science degree, how times change!
Go with the i7 as it's more future proof, it will help with virtual machines and who knows he might do some parallel programming using neutal nets in his final year.
I had a 80486 with 6MB for my computer science degree, how times change!
Associate
As it's 'only' £60 more, I say go for the i7 if it's with your budget
This is a good side point. If he learns any parallel programming, it will probably be beneficial for him to have hyperthreading on his CPU so he can learn how to utilise hyperthreading efficiently. Can't learn it properly if you don't have access to it.
If you're sure he'll only be running 1, then more RAM (16GB+) will be more important than having an i7.
Soldato
The i7, if only for the extra clock speed.