Buying from PC Specialist. i5 or i3? Recommendations welcome.

pinksoir

Howdy,

It's time to buy a new laptop and I'm thinking of buying from PC Specialist. I'm just wondering if I should go for the i5 over an i3, or if the i3 would do for what I want it for. It'll mostly be used for looking after my and my gf's ecommerce site, so there'll be a bit of photo editing on photoshop, that sort of thing. Not into gaming so capabilities in that respect are irrelevent. All other general stuff like movies, music etc.

I've no experience with i3's at all, and no experience with the mobile versions of any of the i's. My self built desktop has an i5 (Ivy Bridge) in it and it is well powerful enough to handle anything thrown at it. I do a lot of the work for the site on this at the moment and the CPU load is never above about 10%, so I dunno if an i5 would be necessary for the laptop. Could be different for the mobile variants though?

So any suggestions would be great. The specs I'm looking at are:

SSD
~320GB HDD
8GB RAM
Intel 4000 GFX
14" screen
No OS.

The two options from Pc specialist i'm looking at are:


UltraNote 14

Intel® Core™i3 Dual Core Mobile Processor i3-3120M (2.50GHz) 3M
8GB SAMSUNG 1333MHz SODIMM DDR3 MEMORY (1 x 8GB)
Intel® HD Graphics 4000 Video Memory Technology up to 1.7GB
320GB WD SCORPIO BLACK WD3200BEKT, SATA 3 Gb/s, 16MB CACHE (7200 rpm)
120GB Kingston SSDNow mS200 mSATA (upto 550MB/sR | 520MB/sW)
Ultra Slim 8x SATA DVD±R/RW/Dual Layer (+ 24x CD-RW)

Price: €619.00 including VAT and delivery.


UltraNote 14

Intel® Core™i5 Dual Core Mobile Processor i5-3230M (2.60GHz) 3MB
8GB SAMSUNG 1333MHz SODIMM DDR3 MEMORY (1 x 8GB)
Intel® HD Graphics 4000 Video Memory Technology up to 1.7GB
320GB WD SCORPIO BLACK WD3200BEKT, SATA 3 Gb/s, 16MB CACHE (7200 rpm)
120GB Kingston SSDNow mS200 mSATA (upto 550MB/sR | 520MB/sW)
Ultra Slim 8x SATA DVD±R/RW/Dual Layer (+ 24x CD-RW)


Price: €673.00 including VAT and delivery.


Obviously any other suggestions outside of PC Specialist are very welcome. Cheers.

looking_around

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-3230M-vs-Intel-Core-i3-3120M

according to the above I5 is better.
But I have used the I3 for photo editing and gaming myself and it handled it well enough.

pinksoir

Thanks. I'm sure the i5 is better, but I guess my question is does it warrant an extra 50 quid? Going by that comparison it seems that they're pretty similar.

How exactly do you mean it handled it well enough? Cheers for the response.

I'm considering getting a 15.6" Ultrabook because of the matt 1080p screen.

looking_around

well it depends how much you need that 50 quid :P ..I mean if you could, should consider the I7 for a noticeable difference.

once I added 8gigs ram .. I had no lagging issues on the I3. Photo editing was fine. Video editing on the hand lagged a bit (not majorly but a bit), though I don't think the I5 is much better in that sense.

yeah, I prefer the 15" myself..but it is a little less portable and heavier than the 14". Go for it.. if you're not going to be carrying the laptop a lot.

pinksoir

Cheers. I'll probably go with the 15" alright. It's only .02kg heavier than the 14" actually. So, like, 20 grams! Though we will be carrying it around a lot. Ah, decisions...

pinksoir

Actually, how do find the matte screen? That's a big selling point for me.

Fiskar

I would wait for Haswell gen 4 Intel chips, if for nothing other than the battery life is a lot better.

looking_around

haswell chips are already out .. but they add bout 200/400 extra on the price.

Abut the matte, I can't comment. I hoping to buy a laptop in the next week or so and will be matte ...mind you if you do editing, you should consider the 95% gamut screens. Supposedly colour is more "true" and crisp.