Best PC Specs for running Captivate

Agreed with Rod.

Most any relatively modern, multi-cpu chip will be fine.

Most important; the more RAM the better. 8 absolutely minimum, 12 better, 16+ great

Next: SSD drive

Next: higher-end video card

So IMO, the i5 or i7 won't make too much a difference. Focus on the video card specs and how much RAM you can get (and ask for an SSD)

Quite frankly your existing system or the one that IT would be willing to purchase should be up to the task.

I do run an i7 HP 650 Probook myself, but I recently found that the standard 8 gig of RAM was not enough in some situations when running Captivate 9 with Adobe's Creative Cloud apps.  So I doubled the RAM.  Your 12 gig of RAM should be adequate.

Honestly the thing that I found to make the biggest difference in performance was changing out the spinning hard drive to a super fast SSD drive instead.  I now run a Samsung EVO 850 1 Terabyte drive and the performance increase over the previous standard spinning drive was incredible.  Now I know some laptop makers will tell you they can give you an SSD with it but not all SSDs are actually all that fast.  I opted to pay for the EVO and I have never regretted it.  I would suggest to your IT department that if they get you an EVO 500 gig drive or something equivalent, then you'd be willing to try that out first to see if it solves the issue.

Don't worry too much about your chip maxing out when rendering out Captivate content.  They always do that.