i5 or i7 for university?

[Swiftz]

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?

 

[Swiftz]

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.

He will be running one virtual machine at a time, the i7 will still benefit more than the i5?

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.

He will need it within 1-2 weeks for university.

If its just a standard computer science course with no arty type elements, then a bog standard 2 core pentium would suffice.

He is doing a networking and cyber security course.

I5 + monitor.

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.

I'd grab the i7 and get a monitor asap

He has a 24" monitor already that he can use to hook up his laptop.

 

[Swiftz]

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.

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.