bornish
lvl.4
Flight distance : 91447 ft
United Arab Emirates
Offline
|
Bob,
I have used an i7 for a couple of years and noticed that not very often I was really using all 8 cores.
Even well written multi-threaded software would rarely take advantage of 8 cores over 6 cores, thus i5 would most likely provide close performance to an i7. Of course assuming that all the rest of the hardware is the same and the i5 processor is the latest generation offering a 2.8 Ghz (upto 3.2 Ghz with turbo boost). By all means, if you can find an i7 laptop that is slim, light and has great battery life (6-10 hours)... buy it. But you have much better chances in finding an i5 with all these benefits and will do the job just fine.
The SSD is a great investment. Once you start using one you will never go back to HDD. Lately, SSDs came also in different flavors and used to be very expensive (the first one I have purchased was costing as much as a laptop). Recently the prices dropped and only the "professional" ones would cost a fortune, but again you do not need them. The regular ones would speed your entire machine hugely compared to a HDD. Why? Because their speed is comparable to DDR3 memory (the ones I have are faster than my RAM) and also because your OS will not need to run in the background a lot of services like "File Indexing" as needed when running on HDD. Note that when you clone a HDD to a SSD and swap them, you should either re-install the OS (new laptop with no personal data yet) or tweak the OS configuration to be optimized for SSD which is what the OS would setup on installation on SSD drive. There're plenty of tutorials on how to tweak the OS after exchanging the HDD with SSD. When you need the extra storage for your videos, simply get external USB 3.0 HDDs. They are cheap and keep your data safer. Having the OS and all the software run from an SSD will make everything run extremely faster. Software, libraries, drivers are also loaded from the faster SSD and is much more important than loading your videos. Power on and shutdown your PC will take a few seconds... hibernation function is useless when you have an SSD. A 500 Gb SSD should be under 200$ and should be enough space for a huge number of software and data to work with.
The NVidia card on that Dell machine is great in my opinion. Do not look only at the dedicated memory of the GPU; number of cores, core speed, memory bus also reflect in the overall performance of the card. Check also the supported features of the card, for example CUDA support of NVidia cards. On this chapter, simply try to get the most advanced one and your cash is well spent.
Regarding the monitor of that Dell, my personal opinion is that you are going to waste the money for nothing useful. Touch screen is nice but useless (in fact I prefer keyboard over mouse most times and definitely prefer mouse over touch). The 4K resolution for a laptop screen is redundant. I own a phone (similar size with iPhone 6 Plus) with Full HD resolution and from experience I can tell you that it does not make sense to have so many pixels on a small screen. Is nice to use Team Viewer on that phone, but the same effect I would get when scaling a Full HD screen of a PC on an HD screen of a phone. The eye would never be able to see the difference. That is why Apple invented the term: Retina Display (means small enough pixels for the eye to not notice any further improvement). If you do not own a 4K TV in your home, that would be a much better investment to make. Get a 55 inches or more 4K TV with 3D (actually stereoscopic support) and great 120 Hz frequency (ignore the dynamic 1 mil Hz which is another BS). These also are very affordable these days and hooking up your laptop to it would really make a difference.
Buying a laptop could be as difficult as buying a car. It depends on what you need it for; should be reliable and affordable; too many options and too many models to choose from; cannot ever find one that really has everything you need, but taking your time searching before purchase should give you an option for something you can settle with; some customization can be done after purchase, and as long as you don't need to change the engine, transmission or other core components, you can still consider it the best choice.
Regards,
Bogdan |
|