Intel i5 vs. i7 for photo editing

I can make an educated assumption that spec for spec that the i7 is a faster processor and that if money were no object to simply go for the i7 and call it a day. Since money is an object, my question for those with experience, is whether the i7 is worth the extra money for straight up photo editing (I don't game, or do video). The rest of the specs (for a laptop) would be in the realm of a SSD and 16GM RAM.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Single core performance has the largest impact in Photoshop and Lightroom, so an i5 and i7 from the same generation with the same clock speed will perform pretty much the same. There are some actions, such as exporting, that will make good use of multi cores, but performance gain drops off significantly after 4 cores in Lightroom and 6 cores in Photoshop.

Take a read through Puget Systems Lightroom CC/6 Multi Core Performance article. https://www.pugetsyste​ms.com …lti-Core-Performance-649/

They also have a similar Photoshop article. https://www.pugetsyste​ms.com …lti-Core-Performance-625/

Mobile i5 are 2 core and the i7 are 4 core. Hard to beat pure clock speed and the quad core can be felt at times. Get the fastest i7 you can afford. There is usually a sweet spot in MHz/$ in the laptop build configuration.

https://www.cpubenchma​rk.net/singleThread.ht​ml

note that the i5 4690K can be overclocked to match the performance of the more expensive i7 and xeon cpus

OP is looking at a laptop so no overclocking.

there are several laptop cpus on that list

Thanks for the great info! Looks like I have some reading to do.

Dell has some deals available through their outlet center. Go to http://outlet.us.dell.​com …IR&cid=258996&l​id=4635114 and see if anything is of interest. Use the filter panel along the left to filter down the choices to (for example) an i7, SSD, new or refurb, etc. But should you purchase, click on "Coupons" near the top right because often you can get further discounts.