2016: i5 with SSD or i7 with HDD?

Katie_70

Commendable
Sep 22, 2016
1
0
1,510
Need to replace my Lenovo whose power cord will no longer connect. I store only photos on my drive, and I run Microsoft Office and WIndows 10. Which is faster, SSD with the i5, or a very large HDD with i7??
 
Solution
I am going to make the assumption that you are looking at laptops with a dual core i5 or i7 CPU rather than the quad core variants.

Since it seems you are only using the laptop to run MS Office and only store photos on it, then you are not really doing anything that is very demanding. Therefore, you will not be able to tell the difference between a core i5 and i7 CPU. Unless you are doing very intensive tasks like heavy statistical analysis or financial modeling, then you can see a little better performance with the Core i7.

As for the difference between a SSD and HDD, the SSD has much higher read and write speeds. A SSD will make a laptop feel more responsive because everything loads faster.

Lets say you will actually be doing...

xFeaRDom

Commendable
Jul 28, 2016
53
0
1,610


It mostly depends on the processors that you pick. But I would say that an i5 (if it is a decent one) with an SSD would be much faster, although, an i7 with and SSD would be even better. But when it comes to HDDs, it depends how much is on the drive is how quick it is, if it is a brand new drive with just Windows 10 on, then it would be much quicker than having 300GB of games on there.

But I would say the I5 and the SSD would be much faster. (PS, I currently have this setup and it loads in around 30 seconds)
 
I am going to make the assumption that you are looking at laptops with a dual core i5 or i7 CPU rather than the quad core variants.

Since it seems you are only using the laptop to run MS Office and only store photos on it, then you are not really doing anything that is very demanding. Therefore, you will not be able to tell the difference between a core i5 and i7 CPU. Unless you are doing very intensive tasks like heavy statistical analysis or financial modeling, then you can see a little better performance with the Core i7.

As for the difference between a SSD and HDD, the SSD has much higher read and write speeds. A SSD will make a laptop feel more responsive because everything loads faster.

Lets say you will actually be doing financial modelling with the laptop and the size of the Excel file you are working with is 12GB. A laptop with a Core i5 and SSD will be able to open the file much more quickly than a laptop with a Core i7 and HDD. But the laptop with the Core i7 CPU will provide you with results from the financial model quicker than the laptop with the Core i5.


If you are just doing "normal" office work like putting together a financial report, emails, and writing documents, then a Core i5 and the SSD would be the better combo to get.
 
Solution
It depends on what you mean by the term "faster". If you mean boot and program loading times then the i5 with the ssd will be quicker. If you are doing intense things in microsoft office then the i7 will be quicker assuming they are from the same generation.