Laptop CPUs

Peerzy · 18 Jan 2023 at 10:39

Hi all,

I'm finally replacing my workhorse laptop (6th gen i5, 16GB RAM), at the moment I've temporarily got a Dell 3320 with an i3-1125g4 and it seems pretty decent. I've now got the chance to swap it for a Dynabook with a i5-1135g7 (rest of the specs are pretty much identical, 1TB SSD, 8GB RAM). So I thought that would be a no brainer but having looked up CPU benchmark and a load of other websites the i5 hardly seems to be any better at all and worth the bother of swapping laptops again.

The laptop is kept in my work bag and only used for that so absolutely no gaming. It's mainly browsing, emails, RDP and fairly regularly I need to manage and manipulate very large quantities of files within Windows Explorer (60k) so heavy on file copies, read / writes etc....

So what's the deal, should I just stick with the Dell 3320 as the i5 CPU hardly looks any better? Am I missing something obvious?

Armageus · 18 Jan 2023 at 10:52

There's not a huge amount of difference between the two (thanks partly due to confusing laptop CPU naming conventions) -

The i3-1125G4 is slightly newer newer, however the i5-1135G7 has a lower TDP (15w vs 28W) so may be better on battery life, has Iris Xe graphics (which should be slightly better), and has slightly higher base and boost clocks (2.4Ghz base / 4.2Ghz boost, versus 2.0Ghz base / 3.7Ghz boost).

Personally I'd stick with the Dell - in my experience Dell's (and Lenovo's) are normally the better built laptops, compared to other manufacturers, and the performance difference between the two won't be noticeable in real world use.

Snapshot · 19 Jan 2023 at 11:00

Armageus said:
There's not a huge amount of difference between the two (thanks partly due to confusing laptop CPU naming conventions) -

The i3-1125G4 is slightly newer newer, however the i5-1135G7 has a lower TDP (15w vs 28W) so may be better on battery life, has Iris Xe graphics (which should be slightly better), and has slightly higher base and boost clocks (2.4Ghz base / 4.2Ghz boost, versus 2.0Ghz base / 3.7Ghz boost).

Personally I'd stick with the Dell - in my experience Dell's (and Lenovo's) are normally the better built laptops, compared to other manufacturers, and the performance difference between the two won't be noticeable in real world use.

And that will be why the i5's performance is barely better than the i3.

hornetstinger · 12 Feb 2023 at 19:53

Check the Lenevo have removable RAM, most of them don't unless you starting going to the Legion. There's the ideapad gaming which I think has removeable RAM

The Dell Inpspiron 16" I have does have two socketted RAM slots.

I'd recommend 16GB for Windows 11 it's far more RAM intensive than Windows 10. I'd also recommend the 16:10 ratio over the 16:9

Ryzen are pretty power efficient also.

dave28 · 13 Feb 2023 at 16:37

I dont think i would notice the difference but Dell business laptops are bombproof.

I had one for many years, running it 24 / 7 and it spent half its life with blocked cooling and i dropped it god knows how many times.

The sound went on it but it ran well otherwise.

It was so tough and just would not quit.

It still lives, I gave it to a member on here for the cost of postage to help them out.

Peerzy · 26 Apr 2023 at 10:54

I did end up swapping over, mainly as the Toshiba has a fingerprint scanner and USB C charger which was nice.

Interestingly I now have another opportunity to swap the Toshiba for a Lenovo Yoga 7 (13") with a AMD Ryzen 5 5600U CPU. This spec wise seems much better than the i5-1135G7 in the Toshiba and worth changing for? All the other specs seem to be very similar.