Core i5 8250u/ RX 530 2gb vram and 8GB ram VS core i5 7200u/ 940mx 4GB vram and 12GB ram.

[momha2001]

Core i5 8250u/ RX 530 2GB Vram and 8GB ram VS Core i5 7200u/ 940mx 4GB vram and 12GB ram. I need and all-rounder. Mainly for some light editing, AE, and rendering. (The laptop with the 12GB of RAM happens to be cheaper.

 

[engineer5261]

Manufacturer / model number? Without knowing any of that, I too would recommend the cheaper laptop with the better GPU and 12GB RAM

 

[momha2001]

Manufacturer / model number? Without knowing any of that, I too would recommend the cheaper laptop with the better GPU and 12GB RAM

The 8GB RAM one is a Lenovo ideapad 330 and the 12GB is the Acer F5 (can't give the specific models now because they're horribly long and I'm not home and don't have much time to look them up.)

The Lenovo has a better screen but both are good enough for me not to care. The acer is actually cheaper because it's a display model. I checked it and it looked pretty good, however.

 

[engineer5261]

When it comes to laptops, I see Acer manages to pack laptops with better hardware at a lower price point while lenovo seems to have better build quality. My wife has a Intel 6th Gen Acer laptop and while the build quality never felt great to me - I do think the performance is decent and the machine has held up well.

Now here is the things to consider
-The Lenovo has a significantly better CPU as the 8th Gen 8250u is a quadcore CPU while the ACER is rocking a dual core i5-7200u.
-Lenovo will likely have better build quality (and screen as you mentioned)

-The ACER has a better GPU and bit more RAM
-The ACER is cheaper

How much is the price difference? Perhaps look at the software you plan on using for editing -can it make efficient use of multiple cores? Is it more CPU dependent or GPU dependent?

For a work-laptop I would personally go with the Lenovo

 

[ajjaatar.tech]

i5 8250u would be easily the best choice here if light editing, AE, and rendering are your main priorities, as it has 4 core 8 threads vs 2 core 4 threads of the 7200u. That is because what you mentioned as your use cases (content creation activities) are more dependent on core and thread counts.

Regardless Ill list all the pros of the 8250u over the 7200u.

1. 8250u has 4 cores 8 threads vs 2 cores 4 threads of the 7200u (as mentioned before)

2. 8250u is a newer generation - Q3'17 vs the 7200u - Q3'16

3. 8250u has higher single core turbo speed of 3.4 ghz vs 3.1 ghz single core turbo speed of 7200u. Higher single core speed is important for every computer tasks. meaning your experience with a 8250u will be snappier than a 7200u (however, ssds and nvme drives are a factor too, in fact quite a big factor, faster storage improves pc using experience by far)

4. 8250u all core (4 cores) turbo will be higher or almost the same as that of 7200u (2 cores). Keep in mind that the 8250u has four cores to push for turbo-ing at a 15w tdp vs 2 cores of the 7200u at the same tdp of 15w. And at the worst case scenario, 4 cores turbo-ing at the same speed as 2 cores is still a win.

5. 8250u supports ddr4 2400 ram vs ddr4 2133 of the 7200u (this isnt a huge deal but still a pro, however, you might get ddr4 2133 ram with the 8250u. so yea). Also 8250u has 6 mb of cache vs 3 mb of the 7200u.

Im sure there are more advantages of the 8250u over the 7200u but I think these are some of the major ones. Overall, if you think about it, you can upgrade the ram later where as you wont be able to upgrade these cpus on these laptops. So it would be a better choice to have the better Cpu, newer mobo and chipset and later upgrade the ram later. And you should be able to get by fine with 8 gbs of ram. Just add a 4 or 8 gb stick later.

As for the gpus both 940mx and radeon 530 arent great for gaming but can easily do light gaming and less demanding games run fine on both. But, if gaming is a huge deal, the 940mx is a better gpu than the radeon 530. But I have seen plenty of youtube videos of people playing games on the 530 with low resolution and low details.

And yes you will make a sacrifice if you go with the 8 gb vs the 12gb on the 7200u, but the advantages of going with the better cpu just trumps all the other points since 8 gb is totally fine and since u didnt mention about gaming, the slightly weaker gpu will be fine for you.

Tldr; pick the better cpu as its irreplaceable and you can upgrade the ram later. However, you might be fine even with 8 gbs of ram and if not just get an additional 4 gb of ram stick thats supported by your laptop. The lower end 7200u at this time will set you back quite a bit in terms of performance, technology and so and so. Buying a 2 core 4 thread cpu in 2018 is not really worth it unless you are a very basic user who only browses the web and does office work. Just the 4 gb of extra ram and slightly better gpu isnt enough to justify buying the laptop with the inferior cpu. (important! as you will be busy with light content creation, make sure you get a 1080p Full hd screen at least) And overall hardware wise, its all upto luck really, my sister had this fine laptop which just died out of the blue after 1 or 2 year of use(motherboard died), where as one of my acer laptops from 2010 is still ok.