i3 versus i5

[MickeyLittle]

So I sold my I5 probably 2 weeks ago and went back to the note pro 12.2 but now I have new duties at work that are requiring a lot of meetings so I purchased an i3 64 gb unit on eBay tonight. It should be here by Friday.

I am pretty much going to use the tablet 10-12 hours a day for One Note, email, Office, Internet, etc. Will I notice much difference between the i3 and the i5?

That's right Lee, I'm back!

 

[kristalsoldier]

Unlikely that you will given what you are saying you will need/ use the i3 for.

 

[Gavin Lewarne]

I notice no difference whatsoever for any office / email / internet / streaming use between my Haswell i7 Desktop, my Haswell i5 ultrabook and my i3 Surface pro 3. Literal;y, none whatsoever.

My i3 SP3 also players Wow, DDO and STO just fine at native resolutions. Elite Dangerous chokes a bit but at 1280x1024 even that is adequately playable.

The i3 also has the best battery life of the three, and my fan basically never turns on unless I'm gaming!

 

[GreyFox7]

Storage is likely the shortage you'll notice first but Samsung is finally out with their 128 GB Evo micro SD with 48MBps speed so hopefully the Pro model with 96MBps isn't too far off or you can play 128GB micro SD card roulette with one of the other well known brands.

 

[mitchellvii]

Until you get into database work and higher you'll notice no difference.

Offload the Recovery Partition to a thumb drive, empty your Windows Updates folder for installed updates regularly and disable hibernation to recapture tons of space.

 

[next_milenium]

I've actually read i3 is better when it comes to CPU intensive tasks such as gaming due to less or no thermal throttling.

 

[GreyFox7]

I've actually read i3 is better when it comes to CPU intensive tasks such as gaming due to less or no thermal throttling.

That's one of those myths like the tortoise is faster than the hare, it's only true in fairytale land.

 

[MickeyLittle]

All I can say is thanks as you all have sure made me feel much better about my purchase.

 

[olimjj]

That's one of those myths like the tortoise is faster than the hare, it's only true in fairytale land.

The way I heard it, was the tortoise beat the hare because he never stopped or "slowed down", while the hare wanted to take a break for from the intense "heat"

 

[Gavin Lewarne]

i tested thermal throttling on my i3 SP3 last night.

I ran 3 continous hours of Prime 95 on "max heat" stress test and simultaneously stressed tested the GPU with heavyload.

According to HWInfo32 the max temp both processor cores reached with 71c and max overall package (ie, the whole cpu/gpu chip) was 72c

that is well below throttling threshold of the i3, and i was in a very hot room with the heating on high because i have a terrible case of man-flu

perhaps i just got a good one, who knows

 

[kevinlevrone]

So I sold my I5 probably 2 weeks ago and went back to the note pro 12.2 but now I have new duties at work that are requiring a lot of meetings so I purchased an i3 64 gb unit on eBay tonight. It should be here by Friday

So basically you lost a lot of money and ended up with an i3 for the price of an i5

 

[MickeyLittle]

Actually no I did pretty good. I bought my Note Pro for $389 off ebay and sold it for $460. Yes there are $46 in fees and $22 in shipping so I pretty much broke even.

I bought my i5 + keyboard off ebay for $800 lost $70 with fees and shipping, however I kept the keyboard and brand new charger from Microsoft that I was going to ebay together but now I won't. So I didn't really lose any money on my i5 either.

As for the i3 I got it with the keyboard for $799 and yes I didn't do too good on that deal but that model hasn't really come down all that much but now I still have an extra keyboard to ebay.

So I haven't lost any money yet, and the i3 is new so I feel like for my needs it will work fine. As of tomorrow when it gets here I'll have a new i3, new keyboard, new extra charger, and a slightly used extra keyboard with only $799 tied up in it. I'm ok with that.

I did mess up a year ago and bought the SP2 for $999, keyboard for $129 plus tax which ran it up to right at $1200. I kept it for 6-8 months and only cleared $900 on ebay! Now that hurt. Then is when I decided to buy and sell on ebay since I tend to go thru 3-5 tablets in a year at times. Even if the SP3 is my main tablet I'll always have a backup. Currently it's the iPad Air 2.