Advice on Buying a new Laptop

[Mahu]

Hi people!

I am looking to buy a laptop and I have come across two that I would like to buy they have a £100 difference but I am confused on which one to get. First of all both the laptops are almost the same but I don't get why there is a £100 difference and which one should I choose.

 

Thank you

 

Laptop 1 Specs: 

CPU, Memory and Operating System:                              

Intel Core i7 8550u quad core processor

1.8GHz processor speed

8GB RAM DDR4

2TB HDD storage 

Hard drive speed 5400RPM

Microsoft Windows 10

 

Display features:

15.6 inch screen

High definition display

Resolution 1920 x 1080 pixels

 

Graphics:

620 graphics card

Shared graphics card

 

Interfaces and connectivity:

SD media card reader

1 USB 2.0 port

2 USB 3.1 ports

1 HDMI port

Wi-Fi enabled

 

Multimedia features:

HD webcam

Built-in mic

Built-in audio sound system

 

Software included:

Yes

 

General features:

Up to 11 hours battery life

Size H2.38, W38, D25.38cm

Weight 2.1kg

EAN: 192018668270

 

Laptop 2 Specs: 

CPU, Memory and Operating System:

Intel Core i7 7500u dual core processor

2.7GHz processor speed

8GB RAM

2TB HDD storage

Microsoft Windows 10

 

Display features:

15.6 inch screen

Resolution 1920 x 1080 pixels

 

Graphics:

Intel HD Graphics 620 graphics card

Shared graphics card

 

Interfaces and connectivity:

SD media card reader

Secure Digital (SD)

1 USB 2.0 port

2 USB 3.1 ports

1 Ethernet port

1 HDMI port

Bluetooth

Wi-Fi enabled

 

Multimedia features:

HD webcam

Built-in mic

Built-in audio sound system

 

General features:

Size H2.38, W25.38, D38cm.

Weight 2.1kg.

EAN: 191628270262.

 

[zhangm Supervisor]

I'd suggest the first one - the two additional cores in the 8th gen processor are worth it.

[Mahu]

2 minutes ago, zhangm said:

I'd suggest the first one - the two additional cores in the 8th gen processor are worth it.

Thanks for your reply. Exactly my thought but what about the processor speeds?

1.8GHz vs 2.7GHz

[Brandon H Supervisor]

I agree the 1st option is definitely better on paper

the extra cores compensate for the lower clock. its a normal trend with more cores
the clock will increase with the turbo as well as needed.

 

my only other question is what are the OEMs for the 2 models? are they from the same company or 2 different brands?

[+Fahim S. MVC]

The 8550u is about a year newer than the 7500u - different generations of processor (Kaby Lake vs Kaby Lake R).

A performance comparison can be found here: http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-8550U-vs-Intel-Core-i7-7500U/m320742vsm171274

 

Also, I'd be careful about buying a machine with a 5400RPM disk.  Doesn't matter how quick your processor is, a disk this slow will be a huge bottleneck in your machine.

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

^ I agree with those people. Extra cores can really help you out. And 8th gen at that.

1 minute ago, Fahim S. said:

 

Also, I'd be careful about buying a machine with a 5400RPM disk.  Doesn't matter how quick your processor is, a disk this slow will be a huge bottleneck in your machine.

He can always replace it with a SSD...

[Brandon H Supervisor]

yeah hard drive is probably the easiest/cheapest piece to swap if that's the only downside

[Mahu]

6 minutes ago, Brandon H said:

I agree the 1st option is definitely better on paper

the extra cores compensate for the lower clock. its a normal trend with more cores
the clock will increase with the turbo as well as needed.

 

my only other question is what are the OEMs for the 2 models? are they from the same company or 2 different brands?

I apologise for not mentioning this. They are both HP laptops. 

[zhangm Supervisor]

Turbo on the 8th gen is going to give you more on a mobile device (for general use).  You'll actually get a marginally higher clock speed for short bursts, plus the two additional cores.

 

On laptops, pegging the CPU at 100% usage is going to trigger throttling due to heat anyway, so the 7th gen chip is going to clock down if the temperature starts rising.

[DevTech]

There is still software that does not take advantage of multiple cores and does in fact notice the clock speed.

 

A good example of that is most console emulators. Limited by the way the emulator works, the emulation of other CPU is very dependent on the clock speed of the emulator CPU.

 

It puzzles me that in this entire thread there was not a single question about the usage scenario of the new laptop. There are lots of scenarios where neither unit is "suitable to task" and lots where both are just fine, so select the one less likely to fall apart.

 

One universal truth is that if you don't use the laptop for anything at all, it will perform great and be a good purchase.

[goretsky Supervisor]

Hello,

 

Just to confirm, Laptop #1 does not have Ethernet?  If that's correct, you may wish to add a USB to Ethernet adapter for times when you need to use a wired connection.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

 

[Brandon H Supervisor]

12 hours ago, DevTech said:

There is still software that does not take advantage of multiple cores and does in fact notice the clock speed.

 

A good example of that is most console emulators. Limited by the way the emulator works, the emulation of other CPU is very dependent on the clock speed of the emulator CPU.

 

It puzzles me that in this entire thread there was not a single question about the usage scenario of the new laptop. There are lots of scenarios where neither unit is "suitable to task" and lots where both are just fine, so select the one less likely to fall apart.

 

One universal truth is that if you don't use the laptop for anything at all, it will perform great and be a good purchase.

you make a good point but at the same time many app including console emulators are starting to code for multi-core use. Look at Dolphin for a good example, they've got some good experimental things in the works.

[DevTech]

4 hours ago, Brandon H said:

you make a good point but at the same time many app including console emulators are starting to code for multi-core use. Look at Dolphin for a good example, they've got some good experimental things in the works.

In the very hypothetical case of someone buying a laptop for the sole purpose of emulation "on the go" then with the current state of the art, highest possible clock speed would be the way to go.

 

There are also a few other classes of software where clock speed is paramount.

 

In the case of Dolphin and Citra and Cemu, the CPUs and GPUs being emulated are just at the (newly comfortable) limit of what is possible and for the most part they work best with a single core CPU of 3.5 to 4.5 ghz.

 

Even at 4.5 ghz, the CPU is too slow to keep up with a precise interpretation of system being emulated so the huge achievement at the expense of some accuracy was on-the-fly compiling of the emulated CPU's machine code to Intel machine code and then executing that quickly. Clearly the compiling task could benefit from multiple cores based on some sort of look ahead or branch prediction etc and separate cores for emulating the CPU, GPU and Audio chips might be another break-out.  The big problem I think is coordinating multiple cores to get the timing accurate to micro-seconds as a lot of the old code depends on the actual speed of various hardware and the precise order of execution. The audio engine is particularly a factor in many other timings. I would not hold out a huge amount of hope that the problem gets solved but for sure some amazing stuff has already been figured out.

 

I have not worked on the code of emulators so I'm making a loose summary, but I have worked on PCI device drivers in multicore Windows and I can say that Windows is NOT a Real-Time Operating System and getting code timing right when you have device driver priority and you want things to happen at a certain precise time rather than the usual case of "fast as possible" is very hard to do. At user level multcore programming, you would probably need to make a device driver to access the HPET or something similar.

 

One thing that really amazes me is the huge progress in the last year in emulating the very weird Sony PS3 hardware with its many specialized CPUs:

 

See: https://rpcs3.net/blog/2018/01/23/rpcs3-2017-wrap-up-a-stunning-year-of-progress/

 

"it’s important to note that the PlayStation 3 processor called Cell is a complex piece of hardware that essentially has two different types of CPU cores: One PPU core with simultaneous multithreading (what Intel would call Hyperthreading) and six SPU cores that games use, which among many interesting features have vector registers, something Intel and AMD would introduce with the AVX extension in 2012 with Sandy Bridge and Bulldozer. The PPU core of the Cell processor is for all intents and purposes quite ordinary CPU core that the main code of a game would run on. The PPU LLVM recompiler uses a fantastic piece of software called LLVM to translate PPU code into an intermediary LLVM representation that is then finally translated, and optimized, into native Intel/AMD code. And all of this is done ahead of time (AoT), before the game starts! The idea here is to get near native performance in PPU code execution and today that goal is pretty much reached. In simpler games with no SPU or graphics bottlenecks this recompiler is capable of reaching hundreds, sometimes thousands, of frames per second."