ASUS UX330UA i5 vs i7

[Crow-M]

Hi,

I want to buy an ultrabook - concretely ASUS ZenBook UX330UA, and there are a i5 7200U + M.2 256GB SSD or i7 7500U + M.2 512GB SSD versions.
My questions are:
- considering price difference, is it worth to pay circa +180€ for i7/512GB ?
- how will i7 effects battery life-time ?
- is there (technical) possibility to swap SSD in the future ?
- is it somehow theoreticaly futureproof to buy i7 instead i5 exatcly with this model ?

Thanks for your answers

(it will be used mostly (90%) for "office" tasks (like university, work, etc.)

 

[samer.forums]

Dont get any notebook with SSD lower than 512GB , 256 is too low and will be full in no time. also the more the SSD is full the slower it becomes ... it is recommended that you keep 20% of SSD space free for best performance.

 

[azaran]

Since that model can have it's SSD upgraded to larger M.2 SATA SSD, the storage option isn't nearly as important as the CPU which (like the RAM) is soldered on to the board and can not be upgraded. You have to make sure to get the right size M.2 format but other than that upgrading the SSD looks to be dead simple.

The i7 will give you more horsepower than the i5. While "future proofing" isn't really a thing, you will get slightly better performance out of it. Since they both use the same integrated GPU, you'll get the same graphics performance out of either one. Both the i5 and the i7 have the same power draws so in theory they should have the same battery life. The wifi being on or off seems to have a higher impact on battery life than anything else.

If you don't fancy the idea of manually upgrading the SSD later on when the 256GB drive likely fills up, then get the i7 version and use it till it's dead. At which point storage and performance will be higher with whatever laptop you replace this one with.