I ended up ordering two Asus Zenbook 14X Oleds on Best Buy’s sale yesterday: one with evo i5-13500h and 8gb ram ($500), and the other with i7-13700h and 16gb ram ($700). Currently using a Dell Latitude 7200 2-in-1 ('19, i7-8665U, 16gb DDR3) but it started having weird keyboard/touch screen issues, so I need something more reliable while traveling though will probably keep using the Dell at home with external monitor and peripherals til it dies.
90% of the time I’m using a mix of Edge (5-10 tabs), excel (nothing too macro-heavy), word, acrobat, powerpoint etc, sometimes google earth. Occasionally I do audio stuff, such as recording live tracks with audio interface, sequencing midi and synth/sample based plugins, and/or mixing with DAW and plugins. Nothing too crazy, just a hobbyist. Also sometimes use an eGPU (Razer Chrome X) with 2070 Super for 1440p gaming (got a desktop 3070 ti for 4k).
The much older Dell has been fine for all of this so far, and I’m wondering if the extra $200 for the better CPU and 8gb more ram on the higher end Zenbook will be noticeable in my case. The lower end i5-13500h processor is already a huge upgrade from my current one which I haven’t noticed as a bottleneck, and even though I currently have 16gb ram, it’s DDR3 and I assume 8gb of DDR5 might be comparable. Thanks for any thoughts!
I think for right now 8gb should be okay. I have 12 gb with an Ideapad, and I always have plenty of room. It is just hard to predict the future, but if you are doing basic stuff like office and Adobe PDF editor. I think you will be fine.
Maybe as an experiment do a short zoom meeting or cisco webex (I think those are free if they are short) with a friend and open up some pdf or office documents.
Many people would love an ultra lite. So, if you sell when you start needing super intensive software, I think the price would be good at ebay or FB marketplace.