I'll take notes. Uh, we left off at implementing an open and transparent
policy for the hom what this
what is it? I need it for work and freeze. Like me,
you've probably looked at the numerous desktop replacements on the market and
thought, if these are so popular, why don't I know anyone who has one? It's a
valid question. Who are the people driving ASUS and MSI to create these
monstrosities? And more importantly, why? It seems like such a raw deal. You
get less performance and less upgradability than a desktop and at a
higher price to boot. Though, on the flip side, with the latest chips from
Intel, the gap has actually narrowed a lot. In front of me, well, not me, that
guy, is a 24 core CPU that turbos to 5.6
to 6 GHz, a 4K 144Hz HDR display, and a
fully mechanical keyboard. I mean, with a system like that, you can do a whole
lot more than just gaming. And we're going to dig into the creative and
professional use cases that are driving people like that to destroy their spines
hauling these things around. And of course, we're going to see how it
handles games, too. because a lot of what we need to talk about has to do
with the RTX 4090 mobile and the misleading marketing that NVIDIA is
doing around this fast but misunderstood
gaming GPU. There have always been laptops that aspired to desktop tier
performance. Some even went as far as to use desktop chips. But it's only
recently that the performance gap between them has become so small that
Apple, for example, no longer even designs different CPUs for use in its
mobile and desktop lineups. So, with that fire burning right under their
butts, Intel has responded with this, the Core i9 13980HX.
And while it might not be the most power efficient, chugging back up to 10 times
the wattage of their lowest end UER chips, if the on paper specs are
anything to go by, it should be considerably faster than your gaming
desktop is. Yes, even yours, Steven. The
result then is a device that is both portable, well technically portable, and
powerful enough to get anything done anywhere, even if what you want to get
done is gaming at max settings, which I do. For our testing, we used the latest
MSI Titan GT77, mainly because we
happened to have it also available with previous generation hardware for
comparison, but any similarly configured machine with adequate cooling and the
same power envelope should perform about like this. We're going to have both
models and more linked down below if you want to play around with pricing of the
various options. Getting straight into our 4K gaming results, it's clear that a
lot of the generational performance improvements here are thanks to NVIDIA
rather than Intel, who managed a very respectable bump in GPUbound titles
compared to our older 3080 Ti equipped GT77.
MSI is feeding the 4090, the maximum permitted 175 watts when you include
dynamic boost, netting us a gain of between 30 to 35% in Hitman 3, F122, and
Cyberpunk 2077, with Red Dead Redemption 2 seeing a 49% increase and Assassin's
Creed Valhalla jumping by a whopping 60%. Temperatures stayed reasonable
while gaming, too. 73 degrees is around
five more than the 12th gen laptop, but our core clocks were also 400 MHz higher
on average. So why then is everybody
complaining about this thing? Okay, well
look at what happens when we add the desktop 4090 to the charts. It is
between 30 and 50% slower, making the
naming well misleading at best. I mean,
this gap in performance makes it look like we're testing two completely
different tiers of products. And the pricing is like piling insult on top of
injury, even when we factor in a comparable monitor and peripherals,
we're spending an extra $300 for this degraded laptop experience. But with
that said, if we come back to our original question, some gamers have very
good reasons for accepting these compromises. We heard loud and clear
that for folks who spend more time away from home than in it, say living in a
barracks or a dorm room, working as a seaf farer or a long haul driver, or
even if you're just a game-loving executive, a desktop might technically
be a better PC, but being able to
actually use your laptop every day makes it a far more valuable investment. I
also have to wonder, too, is this difference even NVIDIA's fault? Maybe
the 13980HX isn't all it's cracked up to be, and Team Green's poor GPU is simply
being hamstrung by a crap mobile CPU.
Unfortunately, tightly integrated mobile devices make it a lot harder for us to
isolate variables. I mean, we can't very well plug a desktop 4090 into a laptop
and then see how the CPU runs. But what we can do is try a couple of more CPU
limited scenarios and CPU specific gaming benchmarks where
no excuses NVIDIA that CPU is fast. Not
as fast as her desktop cousin, but close enough that I don't feel completely
misled by the similar naming scheme. And close enough that it opens up new use
cases for these chunky boys that might not have made sense just a few short
years ago. Let me set the stage. And this is actually based on a true story,
which is cool. You are in the deepest, darkest bowels of a ship. Your job is to
produce a 3D scan of the crew's workspace. The iPhone 12 Pro hasn't been
invented yet, so the contractor in charge of running the 3D scanner pulls
out one of these. I mean, it looks out
of place, right? But I assure you that for plenty of industry professionals,
gaming laptops like these ones are their
daily driver work machines. And if you stop and think about it, it makes a ton
of sense. While they could be served by boring black workstation laptops, the
certified hardware tax, man, that makes the mobility tax look like a like a a
small convenient tax, one that you don't
mind paying. I mean, check out these portable workstations from Lenovo and
Dell. These are last gen hardware. So
smart IT and purchasing managers figured out a long time ago that a clever way to
dodge this premium for what is on a silicon level the same bloody thing is
to buy consumer hardware instead. And I
mean yeah I guess you could game on it after work or before work or during work
assuming you're stealthy about it like our new Stealth deskpads. A simple all
black look and the same excellent microtexture cloth means uh you need to
go to ltstore.com. Whatever the point is, looking at some of our CPU specific
benchmarks, there is a lot for those IT managers to love here. I mean, yeah, you
could do it faster on a desktop, but you could also do it from a hotel lobby in
the Bahamas on this thing. In our Chromium compile and sevenzip
compression and decompression tests, we saw a clear advantage to going 13th gen
mobile with it performing closer to our desktop CPU than to a lastg laptop one.
And while Yuncher and Handbreak AV1 encoding showed a greater difference to
desktop, they do still show a clear generational improvement over 12th gen.
Now, we suspect that faster mobile memory would help close this gap a
little bit. But another factor is also that multi-core workloads tend to favor
desktop chips that have much higher power budgets. Speaking of multi-core
loads, that brings us nicely to the last big group of people who gravitate
towards these machines. Creators, makers, and artists. These are the kinds
of people who need to be able to pack their entire studio into a single
messenger bag. And thanks to the rich I/IO that you'll typically find on a
desktop replacement, including Thunderbolt, that's as simple as
bundling up a dock, a mouse, and a portable monitor, rolling up to a cafe,
and enjoying the exact same workflow that you would at the office. This is
also a group that tends to benefit from the creature comforts that make their
way into premium devices like these. Our MSI unit, for example, has a fully
mechanical keyboard with lowprofile CherryMX switches with numpad, a factory
calibrated VSA certified HDR display,
and high-speed 2 and 1/2 gig wired networking for running projects off of a
network share. Once again, for this group, Intel's 13th gen HX series
flagship shines, managing a flak audio encode only a single second slower than
its desktop counterpart and 7 seconds faster than its older, outdated brother.
And the young pup making the old dog look bad continues in Cinebench R23
where multi-core scores are up 10,000 over our 12th gen equipped machine and
only behind the desktop by 3200.
While Blender GPU testing reveals the same embarrassing difference between
mobile and desktop 4090s that we observed when gaming. Blender CPU has
our mobile chip landing right in between the desktop and our old laptop with
essentially the same story in Proion, Premiere, and Photoshop. So for the
folks who need these machines, whether it's for heavy scientific applications
in the field, visual effects, for live events, aerial surveying, industrial
automation, outside of NVIDIA's relative
weakness this time around, 13th gen looks like a big win. However, soon
we're going to be getting our hands on a new generation of AMD laptops that are
equipped with Ryzen 7000. And if the efficiency we've seen on the desktop for
those is anything to go on, it's going to be a very interesting fight. If you
liked this look at the latest and greatest in mobile performance, maybe you'd also like to check out the
complete opposite. This AliExpress gaming laptop that not only didn't have
an i9, it had a Celeron. Did it even
have dedicated graphics? I don't think so. Yeah.