Best Processor for Productivity?

[cjbeech]

Hi everyone

I'm a student and I use my laptop A LOT, Its typically on for 16 hours a day, but I'm usually close to a charger.

I typically use it for heavy productivity; I will almost always have 10+ Google Chrome tabs open, multiple Word Documents, PowerPoints, spreadsheets etc… when I am researching and writing reports, preparing presentations etc...

When I’m not doing this, I’m typically chilling in bed watching Netflix/YouTube and browsing the web (again, lots of tabs open)

The thing is, I HATE slow, laggy technology that freezes and takes longer than it should to do a task, so I want something that handles what I throw at it like a champ. Especially given that a rely on my laptop so much and I get a lot of use out of it.

I'm looking at i5/i7s, but there is so much variety and I'm not sure what processor will best suit needs?

I'm currently looking at the i5-5200U vs the i7-5500U in the Lenovo Thinkpad series E range (will these be powerful enough?), but thoughts on any other processors are more than welcome! It would be paired with 6-8GB RAM and a SSHD or a SSD.

Also, would I see a difference in performance if I went with a quad core processor? I'm also not sure what generation to look at. As mentioned earlier, I'm usually close to a charger so power consumption is of less importance.

Any thoughts and advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

 

[jaguarskx]

Either the core i5 or core i7 will do. The tasks you plan on doing are pretty simple. The core i7 is probably only 200MHz to 300MHz faster and the things you want to do are not CPU intensive.

Since you like having a lot of programs / tabs open you should get 8GB of RAM. The more RAM you have the less likely you will be swap data between RAM and your hard drive or SSD.

If you are using the laptop on your bed do not place the laptop on the bed itself because a soft surface will block the vents underneath the laptop and will eventually cause the laptop to overheat.

Getting a SSD will help improve the responsiveness of a laptop because data can be read from and written a SSD much faster than a hard drive, even a HDD with a SSD cache.