is an i7 a waste of money in a laptop ?

[1101]

is an i7 a waste of money in a laptop ? For 'normal ' usage (ie not for games or CAD)
If you need that sort of grunt perhaps a desktop PC is a better choice.

Just wondering, as the i7 Im setting up seems absolutly no faster the same model i3 lappies I setup recently.
In fact, the i3 if it had SSD ,would have been much faster than the i7

[wratterus]

For normal processing - no. As you've noticed, it's not the processor that's the bottleneck.

In a notebook an i5 and dedicated graphics is fine for all but the heaviest use these days IMO.

[CYaBro]

I always laugh when I see a notebook with all the bells and whistles: Quad Core i7!, 8GB RAM!, 2GB graphics card! 1TB HDD! Then you see the HDD is only running at 5400rpm!
We get heaps of these types of notebooks in for repair and they certainly don't run like you think they should with such high specs.

I agree that your money would be better spent upgrading to an SSD in an i3 or i5 laptop.

[whiteandnerdy]

It depends on what you need it for, Generally a i5 is sufficient. I brought my mother a acer i5 haswell(I know, don't hate me for it) and I was impressed, it works great and has a long battery life. i7's are better but run hotter and consume more power, reducing both there lifespan and battery life.

I will see how the build quality of it stands up, but unless you plan on gaming or doing design I think the Acer E1-572 or a similarly spec'ed computer is more than sufficient.

I should mention I put a 120gb Samsung 840 pro in my mothers which brings the battery like to roughly 7.5 hours, I comfortably watched 5 hours worth of T.V. shows on it a few weeks ago.

EDIT: P.S: If a Asus, Toshiba or Lenovo laptop with the same specs is around $50 or more I'd recommend that, but at the time of my purchase acer was the only manufacturer in country with 4th gen haswell and extremely well priced at that.

[Nomad]

I saw a guy once with a 17" or something like that widescreen.

[wratterus]

I've been pretty impressed with Acer's latest notebooks.

[icow]

On some of the low power i7s the igpu is clocked higher than the same igpu in the i5 counterpart chip, I find this comes in handy in some cases.

i7's are better but run hotter and consume more power, reducing both there lifespan and battery life.

Yes and no, depends which kind of mobile i7 you're dealing with.

[dugimodo]

Laptop CPUs are confusing, to me at least.

In the desktop world it's simple (leaving out the socket 2011 6 core's and server chips)
Pentium - dual core
i3 - dual core with hyperthreading
i5 - quad core
i7 - quad core with hyperthreading

For laptops though; ....
i3 - dual core with hyperthreading
i5 - dual core with hyperthreading !
i7 - dual core with hyperthreading !
i7 - quad core with hyperthreading
i7 extreme - quad core with hyperthreading

So there's nowhere near the clear boundaries in performance between CPUs as there is in the desktop world and you'd need to compare the specs of the particular i7 and i5 to see what kind of difference you might expect. Some i7s and i5s will be close enough in specs to make the difference negligible. Confusing in my opinion, they should reserve the i7 name for quad core chips.

[icow]

But having the i7 tag allows vendors to charge absurd prices for dual core chips. Why would they get rid of it for the sake of the consumer?