8th generation i7 laptop with 2 graphic cards?? is it worth it?? need help deciding

[medo.fayed301]

Well I've been looking for a laptop for a while, the specifications are
HP intel i7 8550U
2Ghz with turbo 4Ghz
16GB RAM
Intel UHD Graphics 620, radeon 530
1TB storage and 15.6 touch screen

it costs about 720$

is it worth it?? the offer is ending soon so i need a response as soon as possible also... what do they mean by 2 graphic cards?? is that good?

P.S. I won't play games on the laptop, I will use alot of engineering softwares on it such as Etabs and autocad etc

Picture of the specifications.. https/imageshack.com/a/img924/4563/D5IhJc.jpg

 

[Albrett]

That's a decent price. The 2 graphics cards just means it will swap between them depending on if you're using a graphics heavy application, to save power.

 

[jaguarskx]

The price is pretty decent.

There are less expensive laptops with the i7-8550u CPU, but they only have 4GB or 8GB of RAM so you would need to spend extra money to get 16GB of RAM. Also, the may or may not have a touchscreen.

The Radeon 530 is an entry level dedicated GPU... about equal to a nvidia 920mx. But if graphics performance is not a big deal to you, then don't worry about it.

Just be aware that the quad core i7-8550u CPU is a low power 15w CPU. That means most of the time the CPU will not running at 4.0Hz (1 or 2 cores used) or 3.7GHz (3 or 4 cores used), instead it will be running at 2.3GHz to 2.7GHz especially when doing something very CPU intensive such as video encoding.

Here's a review of the i7-8550u.

https/www.techspot.com/review/1500-intel-8th-gen-core-quad-core-ultrabooks/

 

[medo.fayed301]

The price is pretty decent.

There are less expensive laptops with the i7-8550u CPU, but they only have 4GB or 8GB of RAM so you would need to spend extra money to get 16GB of RAM. Also, the may or may not have a touchscreen.

The Radeon 530 is an entry level dedicated GPU... about equal to a nvidia 920mx. But if graphics performance is not a big deal to you, then don't worry about it.

Just be aware that the quad core i7-8550u CPU is a low power 15w CPU. That means most of the time the CPU will not running at 4.0Hz (1 or 2 cores used) or 3.7GHz (3 or 4 cores used), instead it will be running at 2.3GHz to 2.7GHz especially when doing something very CPU intensive such as video encoding.

Here's a review of the i7-8550u.

https/www.techspot.com/review/1500-intel-8th-gen-core-quad-core-ultrabooks/

idk much about computers or how they're ran... is a quad core good or bad or what? and is there something better?

 

[jaguarskx]

Yes, quad core is good and the i7-8550u is better than the i5-8250u. Both are quad core CPUs, but the i7 has something called Hyper Threading (HT) which means it can up to 8 streams of instructions instead of only 4 streams of instructions as long as the software has been designed to take advantage of HT. I am pretty sure most engineering programs have been designed to take advantage of HT.

As stated, the i7-8550u is a "low power" 15w CPU. If you want a "normal" Core i7 CPU that is capable of sustaining high clockspeeds (as long as the laptop is not overheating), then you would need to spend more money on a laptop with something like an i7-7700HQ that is used in many gaming laptops.


The following ASUS VivoBook M580VD-EB76 is one of the least expensive laptops with an i7-7700HQ, 16GB of RAM and 256GB SSD for $1,034. It also has a nvidia GTX 1050 (the least power GPU gamers would consider to be a "gaming GPU") and a 1TB hard drive. It does not have a touchscreen and the screen itself seems to be decent enough for most people.

https/www.amazon.com/VivoBook-i7-7700HQ-Processor-GeForce-keyboard/dp/B071ZL3996/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1522087428&sr=1-3&keywords=i7-7700hq+laptop+16gb