Question Which of these for a Software Engineering student?

[Nifolwight]

1) Lenovo Thinkbook 14 G6 with Ryzen 7 7730U or Ryzen 5 7530U or Core i7-13700H
2) Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 5 with Ryzen 7 7730U or Ryzen 5 7530U
3) HP Pavilion Plus 14 with Core i5-13500H
4) HP ProBook 440 G10 with Core i5-1335U
5) Asus Zenbook 14 with Ryzen 7 7730U or Ryzen 5 7530U
6) Acer Swift 3 with Ryzen 7 5700U

I would like it if there's very little fan noise, because I'll be carrying it with me to lectures, so should I look at low TDP or low wattage models? The laptop will be probably connected to a desktop dock with external monitors, speakers, a keyboard and mouse most of the time though. I'm also not into gaming so there's no need for anything too beefy.

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

You could've listed the links to the laptops for a better(granular) answer. In retropsct, from what you've mentioned, you should bne fine with any of the lpatop's listed above.

What sort of apps will you be taxing your proposed laptop with?

 

[Nifolwight]

What sort of apps will you be taxing your proposed laptop with?

I guess programming applications in general, compilers, almost everything in Microsoft Office and maybe Movavi Video Editor. I often have a lot of tabs (10+) opened at the same time in Microsoft Edge and my current old computer with an Intel Core i3 Fourth Gen and 8GB RAM usually can't keep up with me.

 

[faalin]

Not sure what your price point is but for what it is spec wise is very cheap

Asus ROG Strix G16

 

[bill001g]

This will likely all come down to money and how much value you place in difference between those laptops.

Web surfing with lots of tabs open mainly is a memory issue and I suspect all those laptop have much more than your current 8g.

Things like office and general apps use very little cpu. I have not used Movavi so I don't know what it uses, some of these need beefy video cards since a lot of video apps use the processors on the video card rather than the cpu.

There are many bench charts that will show you the difference between the cpu chips. You need to determine if most your load is single core or multicore use.

The CPU can be hard because it depends on how much the benchmark represents your actual applications. For example you see games really like the AMD chips with X3D memory but a lot of other application it doesn't help.

My guess is differences in screen size or weight and the price will be larger factors. I suspect all those can do what you want.