Intel what the heck are you doing
you finally brought 10 nanometer to a high-powered CPU end
according to our testing it's the fastest gaming processor you can get in
a laptop but to show it off you sent us this
this undercooled underpowered sad excuse
of a gaming laptop that i would be embarrassed to put my logo on do you
have any idea how close we were to declaring your 11th gen h series
processors uncompetitive crap thankfully
for you before we could publish we got a proper gaming laptop thank you Gigabyte
that manages to outperform this core i9
junk pile in spite of the fact that it only has a core i7
an incident that really drives home how you
and NVIDIA and AMD for that matter have made the process of buying a laptop an
inscrutable mess where everything is made up and the specs don't matter
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let's kick off with the good news the core i7 11800h and our Gigabyte ars15p
here is a beast i mean honestly i
thought our ASUS strixgard g733 with his AMD ryzen 5900 ajax would ground pound
this poor thing but that was not the case at all
both laptops feature an NVIDIA rtx 3080 with a 130 watt TDP and in our selection
of CPU bound games the i7 took a convincing lead in every
single one but how
in a big shocker to everyone maybe even themselves Intel finally shipped a high
performance CPU that isn't on 14
nanometer this this is 10 nanometer super finfet baby
and it's real good i i'm i'm still surprised i mean after
Intel promised that rocket lake would be 20 faster and then that turned into 20
faster in certain avx workloads but
actually overall the same or slightly worse
i didn't think this could happen but our tests don't lie
now i should mention that we don't have a proper 10th gen CPU from Intel to test
directly against but the thing is a new champion only has
to defeat the previous champion so
i guess we don't really need one moving on in spec workstation an hours
long CPU test that runs through a wide variety of workstation tasks the i7
11800h which has the same eight cores
and 16 threads bested the ryzen 9 5900x
in the vast majority of tasks now there are certainly still places that ryzen is
king heavily multi-threaded applications like video or photo rendering continue
to favor team red but it seems like Intel has done a really good job of
boosting hard in single threaded or even
moderately threaded workloads so situations where four cores are getting
hit instead of all eight are where Intel shines
back to the point i was making earlier however you want to know what else our
Intel core i7 11800h bested in nearly
every test the core i9 11 980 hk
yes i too was surprised at first but then
looking at the two laptops we have on hand the reason is fairly obvious the
auras 15p offers significantly more cooling and power to its i7 than our MSI
made Intel reference system gives to its i9 and with how dependent these 11th gen
chips are on aggressively turboing that's going to have an outsized impact
on performance i mean i get the point that Intel was
trying to make sending this slim sexy
reference system they wanted to show us that they could compete with this new
class of high-performance thinning lights that AMD currently dominates with
designs like the rog flow x13
but what they ended up showing us is that
no they actually can't because the secret sauce that makes an
eight-core CPU perform well in a design like this
is efficiency and Intel is still
struggling to deliver this is a problem industry-wide right now with NVIDIA's
3000 series mobile processors being a prime example there are real world
situations where an rtx 3070 mobile can
outperform an rtx 3080 mobile that is if
the 3070 gets more power and more cooling now under pressure from
customers and media NVIDIA has started disclosing the tdps of their mobile gpus
on a product by product basis so this problem has been addressed somewhat but
it hasn't been entirely solved and it's
a lot more complicated with cpus now i
could advocate for strict adherents by oems to stick to Intel's TDP similar to
the multi-threaded enhancement debacle with the 8th gen desktop chips but the
issue is that in laptops i don't actually think everyone completely
playing by the rules is a good solution this would bring CPU temperatures down
across the board on laptops and it would make comparison shopping between various
devices easier but it would also mean that performance
is being left on the table i i mean i still don't like it but outside of the
biggest beefiest laptops a mobile CPU is
supposed to be at or close to 100 degrees under full load that's when it's
performing its best and given that all the macbook pros from 2016 aren't dead
yet it stands to reason that running at 80 degrees probably isn't necessary
so then what needs to change is how mobile cpus are marketed
having a core i9 11 980 hk that can
boost up to 4.9 gigahertz on four cores
that sounds amazing but having four cores that boost to 4.9
gigahertz for a couple of nanoseconds before overwhelming your laptop's cooler
and vrms only to drop down to 2.8 is not
amazing so what we're asking is for you to take some pride in your processors Intel
like we do with our water bottles on lttstore.com
it's going to be a lot of work but the thing is you've run programs like this
before create a certification process to ensure that when someone buys a laptop
with an 11th gen i9 core h badge on it
that's going to mean that they have the fastest gaming CPU out there
not that they got screwed out of 200 that they could have easily saved by
getting the same or even better performance with a core i7
now i would suggest that part of this validation would be ensuring that the
laptop can actually deliver turbo boost speeds for an extended period of time
let's say a target somewhere between two or or five minutes and then you lay down
the law you tell your partners that if you can't handle it then you're locked
to core i7 or even core i5 for that matter on that design
because until you guys fix this consumers are forced to rely on
third-party reviews or knowledgeable sales representatives to
figure out how a laptop is going to perform and you aren't going to be
creating a lot of goodwill when they end up with a device that they thought was
fast they thought it was top of the line and then discover later that it's not or
if you want to do none of that at least don't make the reference sample of your
brand new CPU that you give to reviewers an underpowered mess Gigabyte really
saved your butts here sending over a product that offers stellar gaming and
all-around performance at a reasonable thickness with a good-looking 240hz
display like guys if you're going to create the fastest mobile on the block you should
be making sure that that's what we're focused on when we're reviewing the
product so we don't think to talk about something like battery life until we're
deep into our testing which oh i guess we're there now so yeah the
aeris 15p managed 5 hours and 18 minutes
of battery life from its 99 watt hour battery which for context is quite
literally the largest battery capacity possible to put in a laptop by law
now i would expect a similarly equipped AMD laptop to get more like 9 to 10
hours so there's still a very strong case to be made for choosing ryzen
we do plan on getting some more laptops that are actually identical except for
which team they bat for to properly tell you which one is best but for now at
least what we can say is if you go out and buy a laptop with a blue badge you
might be giving up some battery life but you are not automatically an idiot
there's a lot of good blue team designs out there Thunderbolt 4 offers fast i o
and easy docking and those sweet sweet FPS my big complaint
right now is that i wish that when you saw a core i9 badge you knew how much
performance you were actually getting
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our video rtx 3080 mobile is complicated
because making an informed decision while buying a laptop now is shockingly
tough