Which of the 2 would perform better given all else is equal ? The one with the SSD , hands down , absolutely no question whatsoever . The SSD is gold , you want that and it ' s hard to find consumer reasonably priced laptops that have them . Memory you just need sufficient memory if you have enough , then having more lyingaround doing nothing gives you nearly zero extra benefit . Most computers use 23 GB of ram under normal usage . They might use 45 gb under unusually intense or heavy usage e . g . dozens of programs open at the same time . Computers that come with 1216 GB are absurd . Sure maybe 4 or 5 years from now you might use that but you won ' t even come close to that today . An SSD on the other hand is an order of magnitude faster than a 1 TB laptop hard drive . It ' s literally 50100 x faster . and that means everything you do on the computer that involves reading data from the hard drive e . g . opening programs , booting windows , moving around the file system , loading webpages , EVERYTHING will be an order of magnitude faster . The hard drive is without question the slowest part of laptops these days anything you can do to speed that up will directly improve your overall performance . Memory and CPU not so much their performance and capacity are already well beyond most user ' s normal requirements for a computer .