Agonizing about substituting desktop for laptop....

[Bruno Vincent]

I just built a desktop with i5-8400 and 16 gigs of ram.

I'm thinking of selling the desktop and buying a laptop with i5-8250u

Will I see a huge differences between desktop i5-8400 and laptop i5-8250u? In Real life? For productivity, no gaming or entertainment.

I'm attracted by the mobility of the laptop, but actually I would still need to lug the large monitor around...if I move to another country, so desktop could be turned more portable with a mini atx case.

I'm agonizing about this decision, wondering of the desktop is hugely faster or not…

I would like to ad that I already have a old but good laptop. So keeping the desktop gives me both options.

 

[SoggyTissue]

i5-8400 has 11,654 compute points
i5-8250u has 7577 compute points

thats passmark, which uses an unchanged compute power program to determine benchmarks across all cpus of most generations.

you can see that the 8400 is 50% better than the u for compute units. this may translate into 30% more 'powerful'

i am sure there are other banchmark suites out there, but passmark remains my personal favorite as its extraordinary long list of tested cpus is huge.

 

[rgd1101]

For productivity, no gaming or entertainment.

word processor? spreadsheet? or video rendering and stuff?

 

[Bruno Vincent]

For productivity, no gaming or entertainment.

word processor? spreadsheet? or video rendering and stuff?

Web day sign, multiple tab browsing, adobe Photoshop and illustrator.

 

[severinsen70]

If you're interested in a laptop, you could look at the Acer Swift 3. It has i5-8250u cpu, and Mx150 gpu (good for photo/video editing, can also use for casual gaming which is a bonus). Also has a nice small ultrabook form factor and usually on sale for $700usd.

A laptop will always be more portable than a desktop as you'll have to carry your monitor, case, keyboard, mouse, speakers etc. With the laptop it's all there in 1 form designed to be as small as possible. You also need an external power source for the computer. On top of that you can't really but out a desktop and work anywhere, whereas the laptop has that advantage.

I personally opt for the laptop as I travel around alot with my work/lifestyle, I need everything minimalistic. Had an overkill gaming rig I built, but never saw alot of use cause it was too big to lug around. Ended up selling it and getting an ultrabook with dGPU instead.

 

[Bruno Vincent]

What about power? Did you notice a decrease in productivity from reduced performance with desktop?

 

[severinsen70]

Depends what you need it for, a nice laptop with good specs accomplishes everything I need it to do and then some. My desktop was powerful but I never needed as much power as that thing had.