I am looking for a new laptop

FinOxy · October 29, 2021

Hi, I am looking for a new laptop, that would be replacing my current Dell latitude E6540. I have it configured with i7-4800mq and 16 GB of RAM. I also have a 2,5 inch SSD as the main drive.
I am looking to give this laptop to a family member, who at the moment, doesn´t have access to a proper computer, since She has been relying on my desktop, and her phone.

I am going to be using the new laptop for office 365, libreoffice etc. Other abitti-compatible programs. (IK, office 365 in´t compatible, I just use that for most of my school work.) And off course, abitti exams.
For reference, these workloads were fine until the start of this year on this machine. At that time I was running it with only half of the cores (2c/4t). However, it felt a bit sluggish, so I put all the cores to use.
TLDR, i7-4800mq is totally fine for all of these workloads. Also, the JDE and PDE I use (eclipse for java, PyCharm for Python) run just fine on the current machine.

I would like to understand however, how well these workloads I just mentioned, would scale, comparing the i7-4800mq to a more modern i5-10210U.

From what I could see yesterday, when doing my research, the i5 would be only 10-30% improvement in benchmark scores. Would you consider those benchmarks accurate?
Thank you for your imput!

Bombastinator · October 29, 2021

41 minutes ago, FinOxy said:

Hi, I am looking for a new laptop, that would be replacing my current Dell latitude E6540. I have it configured with i7-4800mq and 16 GB of RAM. I also have a 2,5 inch SSD as the main drive.
I am looking to give this laptop to a family member, who at the moment, doesn´t have access to a proper computer, since She has been relying on my desktop, and her phone.

I am going to be using the new laptop for office 365, libreoffice etc. Other abitti-compatible programs. (IK, office 365 in´t compatible, I just use that for most of my school work.) And off course, abitti exams.
For reference, these workloads were fine until the start of this year on this machine. At that time I was running it with only half of the cores (2c/4t). However, it felt a bit sluggish, so I put all the cores to use.
TLDR, i7-4800mq is totally fine for all of these workloads. Also, the JDE and PDE I use (eclipse for java, PyCharm for Python) run just fine on the current machine.

I would like to understand however, how well these workloads I just mentioned, would scale, comparing the i7-4800mq to a more modern i5-10210U.

From what I could see yesterday, when doing my research, the i5 would be only 10-30% improvement in benchmark scores. Would you consider those benchmarks accurate?
Thank you for your imput!

So my take always from the post:

-there would be use in “school” but not what kind or level. Might not matter. Anything “school” generally means build quality and keyboard integrity are paramount. Lots of lugging the thing from place to place and typing.

-use cases are all productivity stuff of close to potato difficulty. A big gpu or high refresh are not needed for these. Anything modern with an iGP should be good enough for those.

-budget is not mentioned.

re: why 2/4 was less than adequate but 4/8 was. Some guesses:

-generally dual core stuff isn’t very good at running multiple things in the background. If there was a major speed boost from more than 4 threads perhaps more than 4 threads were being used? Running more threads than are available is doable, but there is overhead. Sometimes a lot.

-running the cpu with bits of it turned off may have produced unintended consequences.

Edited October 29, 2021 by Bombastinator

FinOxy · October 29, 2021

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

So my take always from the post:

-there would be use in “school” but not what kind or level. Might not matter. Anything “school” generally means build quality and keyboard integrity are paramount. Lots of lugging the thing from place to place and typing.

-use cases are all productivity stuff of close to potato difficulty. A big gpu or high refresh are not needed for these. Anything modern with an iGP should be good enough for those.

-budget is not mentioned.

re: why 2/4 was less than adequate but 4/8 was. Some guesses:

-generally dual core stuff isn’t very good at running multiple things in the background. If there was a major speed boost from more than 4 threads perhaps more than 4 threads were being used? Running more threads than are available is doable, but there is overhead. Sometimes a lot.

-running the cpu with bits of it turned off may have produced unintended consequences.

To your re 2/4
The problem was that windows update pushed just too many background tasks. This affected performance, so I changed it to 4/8
I am a high-school student, and listed my workloads I use
Office 365 suite, libre-office-suite, the programs I can use inside the abitti (Finnish matriation boards exam system), like libreoffice, geogebra, speedcrunch
And the programming stuff I also do on device,
That is althought hard to explain.
I was honestly looking for scaling in these workloads, since the current i7-4800mq 4/8 is totally fine with all of these workloads.

I am looking currently at the CPU-performance scaling, and how things would improve with a newer CPU/APU