buying new dell: question on AC wifi and ULV processors

Hi all

i am in the market looking to upgrade from my 3+ y.o. Dell Studio with i5-520M processor to a new laptop that I will use as multimedia, photoshop, some gaming machine. I had a glance at this new Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Series Touch Screen Laptop Details | Dell

it looks good to me, even if it has a touchscreen and does not have a DVD burner. However I am puzzled by two facts:
- ultralow voltage 2 core CPU: is this powerful enough, is it a good choice over quad core?
- the wlan is N, but at this point i feel that my laptop (whose expected life cycle would be 4 year) must have AC.

Any thoughts to convince me to go ahead with buying it or delay/move on ?
Thanks!!

 

A typically Haswell ULV like the 4200U is going to be faster than the i5 520m, even if not by too much. You can always upgrade the wifi card in the future too, if you find that 802.11n isn't sufficient for whatever you're doing.

 

Many thanks for your reply. I was more thinking wether it is wiser to buy a laptop with a quad core rather than a low voltage dual core ... if the performance is just (say) 20% less than I wouldnt be bothered, but if the quad cores are (say) twice as performing as the 4500U than i would have to rethink it..

 

Right but it depends on what you are doing with the machine. If you are just surfing the web or checking email, the difference between a quad core and a ULV i5, you are hardly going to see a difference. If you are rendering or doing CAD, then yes you'll see a huge difference between a quad core and a ULV dual core.