I'm wanting to upgrade from a dual booted mbp 2011 to a touch PC with active digitizer support (for taking notes in school mostly with onenote). Basically i'm trying to keep it in the $1200 dollar range, and therefore I have to choose between an 250gb SSD and a 750gb HDD + nand flash. I understand that the hard drive is the most likely performance bottleneck in modern computers, but I'm not sure if the 16gb cache drive can compensate for that.
The 250gb SSD is expensive enough that I would be forced to go with an i5-4200u instead of the i7-4500u. My question is whether the SSD will increase performance and quietness by a large enough margin to be worth downgrading an already lightweight dual core CPU. I have already opted for 8gb of ram so that shouldnt be a bottleneck at all. Besides the note-taking previously mentioned, my usage will be pretty variable and taxing, but no serious rendering/video editing. I'll list my common computer activities below.
Note Taking
Software Development (Visual studio, git, python, maybe some directX/openGL, etc)
Multiple remote desktop connections, also remoting into Unix servers over SSH
Visio UML modeling
Light to moderate gaming (Minecraft, Civilization 5) but I do most of that on a desktop anyways.
Obviously web browsing, office, email etc
The 250gb SSD is expensive enough that I would be forced to go with an i5-4200u instead of the i7-4500u. My question is whether the SSD will increase performance and quietness by a large enough margin to be worth downgrading an already lightweight dual core CPU. I have already opted for 8gb of ram so that shouldnt be a bottleneck at all. Besides the note-taking previously mentioned, my usage will be pretty variable and taxing, but no serious rendering/video editing. I'll list my common computer activities below.
Note Taking
Software Development (Visual studio, git, python, maybe some directX/openGL, etc)
Multiple remote desktop connections, also remoting into Unix servers over SSH
Visio UML modeling
Light to moderate gaming (Minecraft, Civilization 5) but I do most of that on a desktop anyways.
Obviously web browsing, office, email etc