Ignore everyone else and just listen to this sound advice;
Get what you need for college, don't worry about future-proofing or any of that foolishness. You can buy a new computer when you finish college once you get a job. Or continue to use this computer because it's going to last you a good 4-5 years.
Now that we've settled that, let's move on to your actual question instead of the side-arguments that are littering your poor thread;
i5: good medium- uses less power, fairly powerful
i7: lots of processing power, a bit more power hungry.
In terms of performance, you will not notice much between the two. The SSD will make things zippy and you have plenty of RAM already (even though RAM isn't a big deal in terms of performance, in your case. You could call that future-proofing). The i7 is somewhat faster, but you will likely only notice this when your processor is running at peak. Compiling programs, playing games and exporting videos from movie software are some common activities that would require this extra 'oomf'. However, even then, there is not much difference.
The decision comes down to a little more zip (i7) or save your money and stick with a still very powerful processor (i5). That decision is up to you. Either way, you're still doing very well.
I hope that helped.
Get what you need for college, don't worry about future-proofing or any of that foolishness. You can buy a new computer when you finish college once you get a job. Or continue to use this computer because it's going to last you a good 4-5 years.
Now that we've settled that, let's move on to your actual question instead of the side-arguments that are littering your poor thread;
i5: good medium- uses less power, fairly powerful
i7: lots of processing power, a bit more power hungry.
In terms of performance, you will not notice much between the two. The SSD will make things zippy and you have plenty of RAM already (even though RAM isn't a big deal in terms of performance, in your case. You could call that future-proofing). The i7 is somewhat faster, but you will likely only notice this when your processor is running at peak. Compiling programs, playing games and exporting videos from movie software are some common activities that would require this extra 'oomf'. However, even then, there is not much difference.
The decision comes down to a little more zip (i7) or save your money and stick with a still very powerful processor (i5). That decision is up to you. Either way, you're still doing very well.
I hope that helped.
