For the X1 Carbon and Yoga, due to the thin profile, you are better off with an i5 CPU. The i7 will thermal throttle under load, so while you will get better burst performance, the i5 is actually better performance for longer operations.
I just got the X1 Yoga (i5 7300u, 16GB) and so far haven't had any thermal issues with it.
Isn't burst performance more important for nearly anything that is not a server?
The main application where I expect to care about sustained load on such a machine is watching movies, and even then I assume modern systems have good enough hardware acceleration that this isn't much of a load.
Is there a good app (for windows), to monitor this? I've got an x1c, and never thought about this, and now I'm curious to how often and how much it throttles.
Performance section: "The comparison of the two Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2017 devices shows that the Intel Core i5-7200U can keep up very well with the Intel Core i7-7500U during continuous load. The reason can be found quickly, since the temperature goal of the Core i7 is already reached after a few seconds, so that the performance has to be throttled considerably. Thus the advantage of the supposedly much faster processor drops to a minimum"
The only way to get that type of information is to follow the user forums -- there's a lot of good info on reddit /r/thinkpad. I've been researching for more than a year before I settled on the configuration I picked up.
I'm same with the i7-7500U on my XPS 13. It's an example of Intel market segmentation where the most expensive isn't really any better, and i'm looking forward to my next Ultralight work laptop being an AMD job - the better graphics will be nice too.
If you're using Linux for work, be careful with AMD - I had no end of trouble with the video drivers. Everytime the kernel updated the screen would only be black with the drivers installed. I had to go through an elaborate process of uninstalling the drivers, booting in safe mode so the video settings wouldn't also black out, run updates, and then make several attempts to get the drivers back in. Happened for both Debian and Red Hat distro variants, and I never found a fix despite a lot of forum research. I'll never try an AMD with Linux again.
