Intel i5-6300HQ workable?

[Rakun]

Hi all.


I'm in the process of buying a new laptop. I'm leaning toward one with integrated intel i5-6300HQ and DDR4 memory. It's a quad core procesor but lacks hyperthreading. The other option has an i7-4720HQ and DDR3 memory. The price is similar, but i could definitely use more battery life (line of work) from my laptop and have heard good things about skylake. Currently i run Reason (8) on a relic hp probook 6540b with i5-430M and 4GB ram. I hit it's limits pretty fast, but it is to some degree workable at least for sketching. If nothing else I learned how to conserve CPU in Reason quite well

The question is: will i5-6300HQ be significantly worse then the older i7-4720HQ for reason specifically.. benchmarks are quite good imho. Any way thanks for opinions.

Raq

[Aquila]

The 6300HQ isn't too bad, but still not great. At least it'll still run circles around the pathetic U-series processors that most laptop manufacturers insist on using.

The 4720HQ is still a significantly better CPU though, although older. So long as there's enough RAM and decent storage (consider upgrading to SSD) it should be the better choice.

[Gorgon]

Hi all.


I'm in the process of buying a new laptop. I'm leaning toward one with integrated intel i5-6300HQ and DDR4 memory. It's a quad core procesor but lacks hyperthreading. The other option has an i7-4720HQ and DDR3 memory. The price is similar, but i could definitely use more battery life (line of work) from my laptop and have heard good things about skylake. Currently i run Reason (8) on a relic hp probook 6540b with i5-430M and 4GB ram. I hit it's limits pretty fast, but it is to some degree workable at least for sketching. If nothing else I learned how to conserve CPU in Reason quite well

The question is: will i5-6300HQ be significantly worse then the older i7-4720HQ for reason specifically.. benchmarks are quite good imho. Any way thanks for opinions.

Raq

If you look purely to the CPU, the i5 scores 5768 CPU marks on www.cpubenchmark.net, and the i7 scores 8074. That's a pretty significant difference. Roughly 30% extra CPU power. But obviously, the other parts in the computer (chipset/memory etc) also count, so not everything will be so black and white as the CPU comparison alone. My guess is that you'll have about 20% extra power on the i7. If it was a desktop, I'd say go with the i5 so you could upgrade the CPU later, which is obviously not an option with a laptop. So if you want the most performance, the i7 is the best choice.

For completion, your current i5 430 scores 2120, so even the new i5 kicks total ass compared to that one.

[Rakun]

Thanks! I decided to go with an i7-6700HQ. Found same model as I was looking at for only 30 EUR more

[mcatalao]

The 6300HQ isn't too bad, but still not great. At least it'll still run circles around the pathetic U-series processors that most laptop manufacturers insist on using.

Aquila, the u series were more designed for hybrid and low power laptops, like Microsoft surface. It is odd that you find a lot of laptops with these!

Anyhow I use my microsoft surface with Reason and it works fine, but it obviously won't run my most heavy Rack Extension Projects.

[Olivier]

moved to hardware and other software