Upgrade worth it?

[zsultan]

I am planning to buy a Lenovo X1 Carbon 2017 which I will be using for standard office applications as well as lightweight programming. Would you recommend me to upgrade the i5-7200U, 8GB RAM to i5-7300U, 16GB RAM for a total of 230€?

 

[Lutfij]

I'd say no. Hold onto that amount and spend it on an SSD if the unit doesn't come with one. Outside of the core/turbo boost and GPU clock speeds, they are identical. For your programming duties that extra clock speed wont do you any benefit.

 

[zsultan]

I'd say no. Hold onto that amount and spend it on an SSD if the unit doesn't come with one. Outside of the core/turbo boost and GPU clock speeds, they are identical. For your programming duties that extra clock speed wont do you any benefit.

Thanks for your answer. What about the RAM upgrade? Do you think 8->16GB will have a noticeable effect?

 

[mpantano]

Depends on what you mean by lightweight programming. If you are building anything in a compiled language that runs for over 10 minutes, I'd say you could like benefit from the extra RAM (either now or in the next couple years, once the laptop is dated). If your programming is simple data processing that runs in a handful of seconds, the extra RAM shouldn't matter. The X1 Carbon is a better difficult case to get in and the RAM is soldered on, so you can't upgrade it later. For that reason, if you anticipate your needs changing, it might be work it to upgrade the RAM now.

I do agree that an upgrade from HHD to SSD is the first choice upgrade for your money.