Concern re AMD Ryzen(TM) 7 5700U speed on Dell laptop?

[Fergal]

Hi, I recently helped a physiotherapy college student chose a new Dell Inspiron 15, 5515 laptop, with the following:

Windows 10 Professional
512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive
16GB DDR4 3200MHz

The processor is: AMD Ryzen(TM) 7 5700U 8-core/16-thread Mobile Processor with Radeon(TM) Graphics

The laptop will be used for attending lectures online, online research, writing up college projects etc. When the laptop arrived I was surprised that the speed was only 1.8 Ghz. The student has been using the laptop for about a week and is happy with it. But, I'm disappointed that I didn't check the processor speed more carefully before purchasing and that money was spent on features that may not be helpful to the student. I feel that if the student had gone to a store without my help, he may have bought a laptop for a lower price, with less RAM, less storage and a faster processor, that better served his needs.

Should I be concerned about the processor speed or is this a good laptop that the student can happily use for the next few years?

Thanks for your help and please be honest, if we made a bad purchase I would like to remedy it.

 

[learners permit]

Should be more than enough cpu for his /her needs. 1.8Ghz is only on battery plug it in and you'll be pleasantly surprised.

 

[ChosenUno]

Those specs are way overkill for general study, and even some hardcore programming (while on battery) so he's golden. Don't worry about it.

 

[pendragon1]

what they said^^^
if he does need more speed on battery and is willing to sacrifice some battery life, he can increase the performance level on battery in the taskbar battery icon, in the dell software or set windows power plan to max.

 

[LukeTbk]

I was surprised that the speed was only 1.8 Ghz.

That the base clock, it can boost up to 4.3 ghz stock, it is powerful for a laptop (even for a new one), around top mid-tier among new models:

 

[toast0]

Yeah, that CPU is the best mobile Zen2, should be pretty nice. I'm not sure that a physiotherapy major really needs this much power, this would be fine for a CS student. You could probably get away with a 4-core (non-Atom) CPU and 8 GB ram, but if he'll take good care of it, this machine should last a long time.

 

[Fergal]

Thanks everyone for your helpful replies, delighted to hear all of that.