So I saw that I could spend about £320 more on getting an Intel i7 instead of the i5 or Ryzen 7 instead of Ryzen 5. That’s the biggest potential price saving of all the components but of course changing the CPU later on is not possible or very expensive (need to change the whole motherboard).
I wonder what’s really the difference in everyday life?
What is the difference in performance between the 5 and 7 models? And also, is it worth waiting for the AMD models (I heard they’re better for the same price).
I am not using the computer for anything intensive such as gaming or video rendering. I guess the most intensive everyday tasks will be webbrowsing, file compression, calculating data tables in Excel, running virtual machines and just generally having lots of windows open at the same time.
My current computer has an 8th generation i7 and feels a bit sluggish (Windows 11). My work computer has an 11th generation i7 and feels snappy (also Windows 11). On the Framework I would like to run Fedora or openSUSE with KDE.
So - should I spend the extra £320 for the 7 series CPU (whether it’s Intel or AMD)?
In my opinion, it doesn’t sound like you need that extra computing power that much? For your use case it might be better to take some of the savings by going with a cheaper cpu and get more ram to enable more multitasking or vms and such?
There should be plenty of reviews for the general difference between Ryzen 5 and 7 or intel i5 and i7 performance online as well if you want to double check to make sure what you can find matches up with your use cases.
Thanks! Yes I was going for the 32 GB. I currently have 16 GB and it tends to be like 80% full even without running a VM.
I was mainly concerned about the longevity, like if I get an i5/Ryzen 5 now, will it still be good enough in 5 or 10 years? But maybe that’s less an issue of 5 series vs 7 series and more an issue of the generation (like I noticed the big difference in 8th and 11th Gen i7)?
As far as longevity, its a tiny bit murkier to answer. An i7/R7 will last longer simply because they are faster, but, it really kind of depends on, like you mentioned, the generational jumps. Additionally, sometimes the jump between the 5 and 7 isn’t really too too large?
I typically come from a more gaming/performance focused approach to choosing cpus, and generally trust that with higher performance today, it’ll generally have good longevity, past the point when I would want to upgrade again anyway.
With an eye on longevity, if you are investing the money now to get something. I’d probably go ryzen as its got the ddr5 RAM (the 13th gen intel in framework still use ddr4), which will be the RAM standard going into the future so it allows you to upgrade your system in the future and potentially re-use the same ram, future-proofing it in a way? (I think this is the only more on the nose advice I feel semi-confident on giving)
I will say, I have an i7-8700 in my desktop, and for gaming it still works fine for my use cases 5ish years since i got it. So, an i5 or Ryzen 5 cpu, for more general productivity tasks in (the very least) five years on should still work well.
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Awesome, thanks! I think the Ryzen 5 is the best price to value for me then.