I need a new computer, one that can handle several Adobe products open at the same time

Attroll wrote: Thank you Ussnorway. I have decided to go with Windows 10 so from what I read the solid state drive should be fine, I hope. I was told that the i5 is just as good as the i7. I read that a couple of places. Where did you get your information about the i5 chip not rendering well? I would like to know now so I can change the order in the morning if I need to.

Define "just as good"

Your new i5 will be a 6th generation chip (i.e, one back from the current) so lets look at the other two compatible chips in that generation. The recommended price difference between them is about $200 (shop around for real prices because many shops will have old stock they are willing to discount) and they draw about the same power 51w vs 65w but its not a laptop anymore so power isn't a major issue now

intel stats = ARK | Compare Intel® Products

In laymans terms a core is the brain of the chip and determines how fast it can do mathematical functions like counting

A thread is how many "things" it can do at the same time so two threads = two things at once and 4 = 4 (assuming ram is free to use) so a chip with more threads will be better at multitasking than a chip with less threads because that second chip has to stop what it was doing or wait until the first task is done before starting another

The i7 is fastest but of course you would expect that and it has twice as many threads so scenarios that involve multitasking are faster with the i7 and not just because it has a slightly higher overall speed i.e, the i7 can do a heavy cpu task and still manage to "walk along" because it doesn't have to stop as much.

As a real world scenario lets say you play around with Adobe Felix to make a ball... The default model has three parts with a colour and some transparency so you set these then ask your system to rendor this image as 1024 X 768 (high);

My i7 chip will rendor this image in about half the time as it takes your i5 (even thou you have more ram) so if it takes me 2 hours then it will take you 4 hours... Now this is 'best case' and assumes we don't do any other multitasking (emails, play music etc) and just allow the system to complete the rendor task while we eat dinner... Its perhaps worth noting that the nature of rendoring is such that the bulk of the image will be in the first half so 1 hour for me and 2 hours for you will give us an image that is at least 80-90% done or "good enough".

Stepping away from Adobe we look at the other major multitasking scenario witch is virtualization. You should opt for the pro version of windows 8.1 or 10 because that gives you the FREE hyper-v and then your windows desktop can have a V-windows 7 (Linux or even server) running inside it "at the same time" as the main operating system chugs along.

My i3 laptop once did a PXE (pronounced pixie) boot demo where I had a V-server 12r2 installing V-windows 7 with in hyper-v whist we watched from the main operating system... Your i5 would just about manage to run the server or the w7 along with its native system but will scream to a halt before adding the 3rd despite appearing to have the same number of threads as my i3 because all i5 lack the hyper-threading technology.

Perhaps you only need to rendor 3d images once in a blue moon and never want a windows 7 | Linux (to say test a game) so then the i5 is "just as good" and you save about 50-100 dollars by stepping down.