- Intel!
What the heck are you doing?
You finally brought 10-nanometer
to a high-powered CPU, and according to our testing,
it's the fasting gaming processor
you can get in a laptop.
But to show it off, you sent us this,
(Whoopee cushion farts)
this under-cooled, under-powered 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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(upbeat music)
Let's kick off with the good news.
The Core i7-11800H in our GIGABYTE AORUS 15P
here is a beast.
I mean, honestly, I thought our ASUS Strix SCAR G733,
with its AMD Ryzen 5900HX 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 SuperFinFET, baby,
and it's real good.
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 (clears throat)
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 SPECWorkstation,
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 multithreaded 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 wanna know what else our Intel Core i7-11800H bested
in nearly every test?
The Core i9-11980HK.
Yes, I, too, was surprised at first.
But then, looking at the two laptops we have on hand,
the reason is fairly obvious.
The AORUS 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 turbo-ing,
that's gonna 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 thin-and-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, 'cause 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 adherence
by OEMs to stick to Intel's TDP,
similar to the multithreaded 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 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 i9-11980HK 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 gonna be a lotta 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 gonna mean that they have the fastest gaming CPU
out there, not that they got screwed
out of $200 that they could've 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 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 gonna perform,
and you aren't gonna 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 wanna do none of that,
at least don't make the reference sample
of your brand new CPU that you give
to reviewers an under-powered 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 240 hertz display.
Like, guys, if you're gonna 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 AORUS 15P managed five hours and 18 minutes
of battery life from it's 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 nine 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 (huffs) 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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And if you're done watching,
maybe check out our video, "RTX 3080 Mobile is Complicated",
because making an informed decision
while buying a laptop now is shockingly tough.