Dell i3 vs dell i5 laptop, what are the differents in performance? Usage --office purpose

[Tharawa]

I need to buy a dell laptop for office uses. Should i by i3 or i5 or i7?

 

[CTurbo]

You wouldn't notice the difference between any of them for office uses.

 

[gervino]

Well the i5 is a bit faster processing requests, but not in a super noticable way. You can ask a little bit more from the laptop (as in opening a bit more websites, documents etc without slowdown from the cpu) but the difference isn't that enormous. If the price gap between the i3 and i5 is big, go for the i3. If the price difference isn't alot, go for the i5.

 

[CTurbo]

An i3 laptop with windows on a ssd would be much faster for normal uses than an i7 laptop with windows on a hard drive.

 

[13thmonkey]

^Cturbo, absolutely, preferably with 8Gb of ram, but i3 to i5, no benefit for the extra £100 for those usages.

 

[guanyu210379]

Reminder:
Laptops have more processor types than pc.
Not only the i5, i7 and i3.
You can also find some letters behind the processor type e.g. U, HQ, etc.
The letter also telling you which one is stronger.

 

[VBK]

We use Dell Latitudes with i3 and Windows 10 at work and they are work smooth. I use windows 10 +SSD on an i3 thinkpad and the thing is blazing fast in boot up and app start.

Go with i3+4GB DDR3 RAM on Windows 10 and you'll have no problems. If you are using Win 7, go for i5. If you have spare cash, i3+SSD >i5+HDD for regular office work and moderate number crunching.

 

[jaguarskx]

I would say it depends on what you mean by "office purposes".

If it is just general ordinary tasks like using spreadsheets, e-mails, web based applications, then a Core i3 will be fine. If you do a lot of statistical analysis or financial modelling then a quad core i7 CPU is the way to go.

Without getting too in depth about the different technical aspects of the Core i3 / i5 / i7 you just need to know the following:

#1 - The higher the CPU "model", the higher the clockspeed which affects performance. So generally speaking, Core i7 have higher clockspeeds than the Core i5 which means it can complete heavily computational tasks faster than the Core i5. The Core i3 have lower clockspeed of the three "models".

#2 - Core i3 CPUs only have 2 cores. Core i5 / i7 come in both 2 core and 4 core varieties. Two cores are fine for everyday tasks. Four cores are better when you run heavily computation tasks since the more cores there are the more data the CPU can process.

That's basically it. The Core i3 will suffice for the vast majority of people doing office work. Generally speaking though, I would recommend a dual core i5 CPU if you can afford it.

 

[velo3100]

It depends on the tasks you are doing. I would choose an i5 chip unless you are on a budget. Don't choose the i7 unless you require a lot of performance.