Hey guys, Jarrod here and today we’re going to compare a few different high end laptop
CPUs against each other with a series of benchmarks to help you determine which you should get
in your next laptop.
We’ll be looking at the Intel 6700HQ, 6700K, 7700HQ, 7820HK, and 7700K CPUs.
It’s important to note that each of these is in a different laptop, so the cooling solutions
will differ slightly which could ultimately affect performance.
Additionally we’re not looking at any gaming benchmarks here, as the laptops all have different
graphics cards, so it’s not possible to get a consistent result.
Due to this we’ll only be looking at pure CPU power throughout a number of different
CPU based benchmarks to get an idea of how these CPUs compare against each other, and
find out what the difference in performance between them is.
It’s worth noting that AMD Ryzen based laptops are just around the corner and will change
things up in this area, so make sure you subscribe for when I take a look at comparing Ryzen
CPUs.
Let’s take a quick look at the important specs associated with each of the five CPUs.
All five are quad core CPUs with 8 threads, and two are desktop CPUs while 3 are mobile
chips.
The two desktop CPUs have an extra 2MB of cache and a higher TDP of 91w, and of course
the three CPUs ending with the letter K can be overclocked.
We can see that the main difference between the Skylake and Kabylake CPUs is that the
newer ones are clocked slightly higher, so let’s see what this means in terms of performance
by taking a look at our benchmarks.
We’ll start off with Cinebench.
We can see that the 7700K is coming out ahead as should be expected as the most powerful
CPU in our test, with the 6700K only slightly behind.
While these are both traditionally desktop CPUs, there are laptops with them available.
The 7820HK came in at third place followed closely by the 7700HQ, with the 6700HQ in
last place.
Next in the PassMark benchmark we’ll be looking purely at the CPU scores of each chip
rather than overall system score.
The results start to get a little interesting here, as the 6700K is now ahead of the pack
with the 7700K close behind in 2nd place.
Interestingly, the 7820HK mobile chip is not that far behind the 7700K in this test.
It's also interesting that the 6700HQ came out ahead of the newer 7700HQ, so this test
appears to be favouring the Skylake CPUs for some reason, which makes me think that perhaps
it's somehow not correctly optimized for the newer Kabylake chips, I'm not exactly sure
as I don't know what it's doing under the hood, but the results are interesting nonetheless.
In GeekBench 4 we can see the results of single core performance, which tends to favour newer
CPUs with a higher clock rate.
The results aren't too surprising, and match what we saw in Cinebench with the 7700K coming
out ahead followed by the 6700K, 7820HK, 7700HQ then 6700HQ.
Things get a little more interesting in the multicore results.
The Geekbench 4 multicore test uses all cores at once rather than just a single core as
per the last test.
All five of these chips are quad core CPUs, however it’s worth keeping in mind that
the turbo boost works different in mobile chips when compared to the desktop chips.
With the mobile CPUs, they don’t boost up as high when more cores are in use during
multicore workloads, and we can see this shown here in the results.
The desktop CPUs have pulled further ahead of the HQ CPUs when compared with the single
core results shown previously, which I suspect is due to this difference in how turbo boost
works.
It's also worth noting that the older 6700HQ beat the 7700HQ again, just like in PassMark,
and again I'm not exactly sure why that is the case as I don't know what the benchmark
tool is doing behind the scenes.
I ran these tests multiple times and always got the same results.
Now onto video encoding with Handbrake.
In this test I’m converting a 500MB MP4 1080p video that I recorded to 720p.
Again the 7700K and 6700K CPUs are out in front by quite a bit, with the 7820HK and
7700HQ a little further behind with the 6700HQ taking the longest amount of time to complete
the process.
Finally in the 7-Zip benchmark we can see how well each CPU does at compressing and
decompressing data.
As expected the higher clocked CPUs are coming out on top, however the 7700K was only just
slightly ahead of the 6700K this time around.
The 7820HK is further behind with the 7700HQ not too far behind that, and finally the 6700HQ
was only just slightly behind the 7700HQ.
So based on these results which CPU should you look at getting in your next laptop?
To be honest, I’ve had great all round experiences with all of these CPUs to the point where
it wasn’t even really noticeable to me day to day, they are all fairly high end in terms
of a laptop CPU.
I still use a 6700HQ based laptop at work every day which came out on the bottom in
most of these tests, yet it still provides me with excellent real world performance.
Even playing games that traditionally make more use of CPU than graphics still work pretty
well, you can see my other laptop review videos for more specific gaming benchmarks using
the laptops I tested here.
Realistically, I think you’ll have a great experience with any of these CPUs in your
laptop.
We can see that there isn’t actually much increase between the slightly older Skylake
based CPUs compared with the Kabylake ones, so it’s probably still perfectly acceptable
to save some money and get the older generation, as long as you don’t need Kabylake specific
features such as hardware 4K decoding.
It’s also important to consider battery life in your choice, while I did not test
battery life here as the battery sizes in the 5 different laptops varied far too much,
keep in mind that typically a faster CPU is going to chew through more power quicker,
which may not be ideal in a laptop.
Better results from the K CPUs could also be gained if I had overclocked them, however
from previous testing the overclock does not help much in these tests but drains a lot
more power.
I didn’t include overclocking as I didn’t have results for the 7820HK, so I thought
it was better to leave them out for now, I plan on revisiting overclocking in a future
video.
So which of these CPUs are you looking to get in your next laptop and why?
Be sure to let me know your thoughts down in the comments, and leave a like on the video
if you found the information useful.
Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this
one.