quad core laptop for under $500?

[jhurst117]

as the title suggests. im going to be attending college in the fall and I want something with a little more power than your average notebook im going to be taking a computer science course and feel with what ill be doing a duo core wont be enough dont know if I can get a quad core i5/7 notebook fore that price or where to look in the first place. refurbished or not doesnt matter neither does os just want to know if its even feasible to get something of that level for around that price

[owenhar1]

4 minutes ago, jhurst117 said:

as the title suggests. im going to be attending college in the fall and I want something with a little more power than your average notebook im going to be taking a computer science course and feel with what ill be doing a duo core wont be enough dont know if I can get a quad core i5/7 notebook fore that price or where to look in the first place. refurbished or not doesnt matter neither does os just want to know if its even feasible to get something of that level for around that price

Why don't you think a 2-core CPU won't be enough? If it is for school whats the point on spending 500$ for a school laptop.

[jhurst117]

2 minutes ago, owenhar1 said:

Why don't you think a 2-core CPU won't be enough? If it is for school whats the point on spending 500$ for a school laptop.

I want to be able to do moderate to heavy amounts of java and c++ coding as well as small test environments away from home but dont know if a ram limitation or cpu limitation would be the case and getting a quad core would give me more cache to work with as well as more cores and I can always upgrade the ram later on just want to get something that I can do a lot with as screen resolution doesnt matter at all for what I want to accomplish I just need raw power without breaking the bank in something I can carry around in my back pack

[GER_T4IGA]

For computer science you should not need to much horsepower. It's not like you will be doing fotoshop or something

[forthe48]

7 minutes ago, jhurst117 said:

as the title suggests. im going to be attending college in the fall and I want something with a little more power than your average notebook im going to be taking a computer science course and feel with what ill be doing a duo core wont be enough dont know if I can get a quad core i5/7 notebook fore that price or where to look in the first place. refurbished or not doesnt matter neither does os just want to know if its even feasible to get something of that level for around that price

You oughta be able to find something with an i5 around $500 USD. I do agree that a newer dual-core processor would probably be adequate for just schoolwork type things, even if it is programming.

There's nothing wrong with wanting more performance, though. I'm no laptop expert so someone who knows more about them could chime in with something better, but here's an ASUS Laptop with a modern i5 and 8GB of RAM for just under 500 - https://www.amazon.com/Asus-X751LAV-Performance-17-3-inch-Backlight/dp/B01GKDCMOM/ref=sr_1_14?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1468625010&sr=1-14&refinements=p_n_feature_four_browse-bin%3A2289793011%2Cp_36%3A2421886011%2Cp_n_feature_five_browse-bin%3A7817224011%2Cp_n_operating_system_browse-bin%3A12035945011

[GER_T4IGA]

Maybe look into some "good old"(not literally old) used Thinkpads?

[jhurst117]

1 minute ago, GER_T4IGA said:

Maybe look into some "good old"(not literally old) used Thinkpads?

Thats probably one of the best bets

[forthe48]

5 minutes ago, jhurst117 said:

Thats probably one of the best bets

If you want to go thinkpad, I love my X220. People say the smaller screen size is bad for coding/etc, and truth be told I don't use the x220 very often, but it's great when I do.

 

Looks like you can get an x240 with an i5 for under $300 in some cases used. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-X240-20AL-008XUS-500GB-HDD-8GB-RAM-WIN10-I5-/112055963745?hash=item1a170e5061:g:xMQAAOSwAPlXhvaT

[Pendragon]

1 hour ago, jhurst117 said:

I want to be able to do moderate to heavy amounts of java and c++ coding as well as small test environments away from home but dont know if a ram limitation or cpu limitation

Neither of these require more than 1 core because these are single threaded usages. The speed of your workload will scale with clock speed and not more threads. While there are jvm s that can use tons of horsepower, the average person won't be using them. Get lots of ram though. That does help. 

[im_an_wizard]

Programmer here. Processing power really isn't that important. You can write C code on a 15 year old computer. The thing I would recommend most to increase build times is a SSD. Most of the build time is the HDD searching for random small files. A i5 would be fine. If you're doing virtual machines, then I'd recommend a i7+16gb of ram. None the less, the most important thing is having a SSD.