Understanding CPU’s

wizzywig27

wizzywig27

wizzywig27

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I am in the market for a new laptop and as I am generally used to silicone Macs I am not really sure what to look for in a windows laptop.

Can someone try and put it as simple as possible for me. My understanding is this:

Intel i3 - budget
Intel i5 - low mid range
Intel i7 - high mid range
Intel i9 - high end

Ryzen 3 - budget
Ryzen 5 - low mid range
Ryzen 7 - high mid range
Ryzen 9 - high end

I popped into curry’s today and seen so many new processors, such as the Intel Evo.

I understand in each of the individual CPU’s there is different clock speeds and cores etc, as different generations, but anything anyone can add would be helpful.

I don’t do much on laptop, no high end gaming, most I would play would be strategy games, such as cities skylines, football manager etc.

As I said, I am not certain what to aim for, ideally I don’t want budget so maybe high mid range area.

Thanks all
 
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wizzywig27 said:
most I would play would be strategy games, such as cities skylines, football manager etc.
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This is a highly demanding game, at least the newer one is.

wizzywig27 said:
My understanding is this:

Intel i3 - budget
Intel i5 - low mid range
Intel i7 - high mid range
Intel i9 - high end
Click to expand...
Pretty much, but keep in mind that with laptops they usually have less cores/threads than the desktop CPUs.

My opinion is that for general desktop usage, the lack of ram and limited storage is often more of a problem than a modern i3/i5 would be.
 
Tetras said:
This is a highly demanding game, at least the newer one is.


Pretty much, but keep in mind that with laptops they usually have less cores/threads than the desktop CPUs.

My opinion is that for general desktop usage, the lack of ram and limited storage is often more of a problem than a modern i3/i5 would be.
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Thank you, this is very helpful.

I was thinking of 8-16gb of DDR4 RAM.

So ideally I’d be thinking of either Ryzen 5 or 7 or Intel i5 or i7
 
Does anyone know what the latest Gen of both the Intel and Ryzen is?

I think Intel is 14th Gen, unsure about Ryzen.

I think when I read about CPU’s when I built my desktop that there was a Gen of intels that were generally rubbish, I think it was the 11th Gen?
 
wizzywig27 said:
I was thinking of 8-16gb of DDR4 RAM.
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I understand that with laptops having lots of memory and storage out of the factory makes it expensive, but 8GB DDR4 in 2024 is heinous!

I can only imagine it being successful, if you like browsing with 1 tab open. 16GB is fine, but 32GB makes the PC far more responsive in my experience, since it can load a lot more into memory and use the SSD far less, though if you turn off your laptop regularly that's going to be less useful.

Skylines is also well known as a RAM hog, so I can't imagine it will run at all well with 8GB.

wizzywig27 said:
I think when I read about CPU’s when I built my desktop that there was a Gen of intels that were generally rubbish, I think it was the 11th Gen?
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11th gen desktop CPUs were widely panned, but 11th gen of laptop CPUs used a different architecture to the desktop (so did 10th).

You might want to have a look at Hardware Unboxed, since they have a few laptop reviews:

This channel has lots too:
 
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