Should I get i5 or i3 for laptop?

[hari1]

I am going to buy a laptop for mainly programming, web surfing, movies, some Photoshop editing
and light gaming. I will be doing a lot of multitasking on the laptop.

How much fast performance can I expect with i5 over i3? Or it will be mostly similar? Any percentages will be good for comparison. Also how does AMD A8 fares against the two?

 

[harshilsharma63]

As the processor of a laptop is not upgradable, and seeing the increasing need and effectiveness of quad core cpu's, I would strongly recommend i5 over i3.

 

[coderunknown]

i5 = i3 + higher clockspeed + more L3 cache & lastly turbo.

unless the light gaming involves newly released games, i5 is worth the extra cost (usually 3-4k) compared to A8.

 

[Cilus]

For Laptop, get i5 is the way to go. But keep in mind, as harshilsharma63 have already mentioned, Laptop i5 Processors are not Quad Core, they are Dual core with HT enabled with higher cache size and higher speed than their i3 brothers. Also they have the Turbo Boost feature, missing in the i3.
If you are getting the Laptop, make sure it has a decent Graphics card like GT 630M or HD 7670M. Apart from gaming, they can also accelerate tasks like Video Encoding and Photoshop Editing while using different filters.