Intel i7-8550U

Status
Not open for further replies.
Well it's an i7 8th gen, so you can't really go wrong. However the U suffix would suggest it's for a laptop.

Do you need a processor for a laptop or a desktop?
 
Is this for email and web browsing? I so, that processor will fly and serve you well for at least 10 years. 4 cores 8 threads and a clock speed up to 4.0 Ghz...tough to go wrong.

I'm rocking an i5-7200U and it does a great job, and it's half the processor.
 
If you plan to keep your laptop a long time, I'd recommend ponying up for the i7. I'm using a four year old i7 unit, and it still outperforms many 2018 models.

If you are wanting a gaming machine without the gaming machine price, aside from the CPU just pay attention to the graphics subsystem and the current requirements of the games you want to play. Game developers are always pushing that envelope, but they also want customers, so if it will do today, it probably will still do for the expected lifetime of your machine. You can't really expect that with a business-class low performance machine with basic graphics.

You can save money by not opting for a SSD right away, although it does offer exceptional performance, it can also always be retro-fitted in the future. Choose the least amount of user-replaceable RAM as configured and then buy the biggest user-replaceable upgrade from a trusted 3rd party vendor with lifetime warranty to save the most money and get the best performance.

16GB is a nice point right now, but know that software developers (including OS developers) eat RAM like it was candy, because they are either jerks or want to offer the most advanced experience (you decide) so it won't be considered "extra" for long. Also only about 1% of web developers actually spend any effort whatsoever on optimizing code, so the norm tends to be just re-using code created by others, a lot of which isn't very lean, and it gets pretty bloated pretty fast. So RAM helps with surfing.
 
We rolled out about 150 dell laptops to users at work within the past 18 months.

I was tasked with doing some bench-marking and analysis of what the needs were.

We used to blindly purchase i7's, but in the business environment running windows 10, we found the pricepoint and performance of the i5 to be great, paired with 8gb of memory, and a M2 drive.

We also would purchase the discreet GPU, but have stopped doing so, unless you are gaming or doing some kind of rendering most people are well served by the intel video solution.

Disk speed has everything to do with user experience and overall speed. The world has already gone to all flash, and even the SAN's are going to all flash.

Spinning disks in laptops make zero sense, and they are a huge bottleneck.

In my vdi environment, we have task workers on 1 cpu and 2 cores, with 4gb of memory and w10 runs very acceptably.

Power users get 2 cpu and 4 cores, and 6gb memory, and 3d card. It runs faster than many laptops.

Of course this is a much different envriornment than a local computer, but windows 10 does a lot with not so much RAM or cpu.
 
Originally Posted By: JustinH
we found the pricepoint and performance of the i5 to be great, paired with 8gb of memory, and a M2 drive.


Couldn't agree more.
 
Originally Posted By: dishdude
Originally Posted By: JustinH
we found the pricepoint and performance of the i5 to be great, paired with 8gb of memory, and a M2 drive.


Couldn't agree more.


Agree, my $1000 MacBook Pro 2017 flies with i5, 8GB Rami, and ultra fast 128GB SSD. I use it for work as cloud application architect.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top