Xeon or i7?

[BuffaloBillsWildWestShow]

Hello,

I will be picking up a Thinkpad P71 in the next coming days. It will strictly be used for my business which is an eBay and Amazon store and also for gaming. I have two laptops to choose from. Both are refurbed models from Lenovo's Outlet website. The first one has the following specs:

Xeon E3-1535 v6
Nvidia Quadro P5000M
8GB DDR4 2400Mhz SODIMM (will upgrade in the near future to either 16 or 32gb)
500GB 7200RPM SATA 2.5" HD (will upgrade in the near future to 1TB SSD M.2)

The second option has the same specs as the first (including immediate upgrades), but with an i7-7700HQ cpu.

Need to know if I will see much of a performance loss in gaming or day-to-day browser/word processing tasks if I were to go with the i7 vs the Xeon?

Thanks for the input.

Bill

 

[thecoolnessrune]

You wouldn't lose much for gaming and day to day browsing. In all honesty though, the P71 for a gaming + web browsing system is a fairly poor choice, as it's designed to be a CAD focused workstation. The P5000, in its best variant, is equivalent to a 1070, but with more memory. Considering you're not mentioning any professional use applications, it's paying a substantial amount of money for something you won't use. The CPU option, including the i7-7700HQ is also a generation old. A MSI GT75 Titan dressed in the i7-8850H (2 more cores, 100Mhz lower Turbo) and a GTX 1080 that is demonstrably more powerful than the P5000 for gaming (much more so than the difference between that i7 and the Xeon), along with a rather unnecessary 64GB of RAM is $2,900. So unless there was a substantial discount on that Lenovo in the Outlet + the costs of upgrades, it's a poor fit for your use case compared to alternatives out there.

 

[BuffaloBillsWildWestShow]

Thanks for the feedback. So, what I didn’t mention was that I have already purchased and returned both a similarly specked P71 and an Alienware 17 R5. From what I could tell, regarding typing experience and build quality, these two models are at the top. Between the two, the Thinkpad topped the AW. I do understand that the Quadro P5000 is lower than the gtx 1080, but I figured I would eventually get an external gpu down the road. Also, I have two yellow labs that shed so much that there will most likely still be hair around when my wife and I pass on to the next life. The Thinkpad is rated mil-spec 810G and puts my mind at ease regarding dander and hair clogging up the laptop on a regular basis. I am just trying to determine how much of a performance hit I would be taking if I were to get the i7 vs the Xeon.

Thanks again!

You wouldn't lose much for gaming and day to day browsing. In all honesty though, the P71 for a gaming + web browsing system is a fairly poor choice, as it's designed to be a CAD focused workstation. The P5000, in its best variant, is equivalent to a 1070, but with more memory. Considering you're not mentioning any professional use applications, it's paying a substantial amount of money for something you won't use. The CPU option, including the i7-7700HQ is also a generation old. A MSI GT75 Titan dressed in the i7-8850H (2 more cores, 100Mhz lower Turbo) and a GTX 1080 that is demonstrably more powerful than the P5000 for gaming (much more so than the difference between that i7 and the Xeon), along with a rather unnecessary 64GB of RAM is $2,900. So unless there was a substantial discount on that Lenovo in the Outlet + the costs of upgrades, it's a poor fit for your use case compared to alternatives out there.

 

[TimCh]

Both are 4 core 8 thread Kaby Lake CPUs, the Xeon is clocked about 10% faster.

The performance difference won't be noticeable in gaming or browsing.

 

[fire400]

thinkpad's are nice for business, but at this point, it doesn't have to be a thinkpad if you're gaming on it.

not a big fan of the idea of "upgrading" in the near future if you're going to be spending that much money and getting something pre-loaded with an HDD... ???
might as well spend the money where it needs to go, get a system already loaded with 16gb RAM and load in the M.2 SSD (***EDIT: NVME) right away for the OS, and a slower SSD/SSHD for the games if that's possible.

consider either running a lower priced separate business thinkpad without as much juice, with i5-i7/8gb-16gb/SSD if your business is really growing, and then drop your funds on a gaming desktop or gaming laptop with excellent cooling.

btw, if you're going refurb, you might as well get it outside of Lenovo, where a warranty is already pre-attached to an existing serial

and if you have funds to blow and just want one system only, just do the MSI gaming laptop mentioned earlier.