CPU for energy efficient system

[joeman42_43]

Guys

I have a holistic question as to how important CPU speed is for a PC for the applications I use. I always have 10-15 tabs open in my browser and another 5-10 windows open (word, pdf, office communicator, outlook, etc) - I only have two fingers and may only use 1-2 apps at a given point of time. I do use a lot of keyboard shortcuts

Occasionally, I will turn on my Vmware to run 1-2 guest machines but don't want this to be a priority since I'll be doing it maybe once a month

All the above points to a system which should have a lot of memory and not necessarily CPU. Is my analysis correct? Will I be missing much if I go with a G840/i3 vs an i7

Thanks!

 

[rvilkman]

Generally for that amount of multitasking you should have a good amount of memory: 8GB should be ok and you can always add more later if it doesn't seem to be enough. Ideally a CPU with many cores (4+) would be benefitial for you as well.

The HT cores on the i7 won't really help you that much, your multitasking prefers real cores to simulated ones. So might even consider AMD hex cores for this use. But generally 4 cores seems to be the sweet spot so probably i5's.

Also depending on how often you open and close your applications an SSD would probably make sense to give you a nice speed boost for those situations.

So I would say that: i5 2400, 64-120GB SSD and 8GB of Ram should get you what you are after.