Illustration: Laptop Mag Back to School Guide If you want to play games or do content creation, you may want to spring for a discrete GPU. Rather than paying $100 or $200 more for a Core i7 on your laptop, you'd be better off spending your money on moving from a hard drive to an SSD, getting a larger SSD or making sure you have at least a 1080p screen.

Even if you’ll occasionally do some light photo or video editing, it will be only a tiny bit slower with a Core i5. If you’re a serious gamer or video editor, you'll see larger laptops with quad-core Core i5 or Core i7 CPUs that are part of the HQ or HK series (example: Core i7-7700HQ).In those series, the i7 chips can run eight threads, while the Core i5 models run only four, which might provide a bigger delta in performance than we saw between the U series chips.įor the average person, who will be jumping between web browsing, streaming some videos and working on Word documents, it would be wasteful to pay for the extra performance of a Core i7. A minute of extra processing here, a few more frames there, but almost nothing all that noticeable.

While the Core i7-7500U-powered laptop showed stronger performance on just about every test, it wasn’t all that much better than what the Core i5-7200U model had to offer.