A single minute spared during video editing certainly isn't worth $150 to $200. At most, the Core i7 is only 6 percent faster in overall performance, which is quite underwhelming when you consider the price difference.

Which Intel CPU should you get?Īlthough the Core i7-8550U beat the Core i5-8250U fair and square, it really wasn't by much.

However, the Core i7 stood its ground and survived for 10 hours and 49 minutes, making an unnoticeable 0.3 percent difference to the Core i5. The Core i5 lasted 10 hours and 51 minutes, sailing past the 09:06 ultraportable notebook average. With great power comes great power consumption, so we decided to test that by having each laptop continuously surf the web over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness. Meanwhile, the Core i7 nailed an 83,684, effectively making it 5.8 percent better than the Core i5, which is the same exact increase as the general performance. On the 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited benchmark, which tests the overall graphics performance, the Core i5's GPU hit 78,801, falling just short of the 78,827 ultraportable notebook average.