AMD’s Ryzen 7 6800H laptop processor isn’t really worth spending more money on compared
to the older and possibly cheaper 5800H.
I’ve compared both in games and applications to show you why!
Both CPUs have 8 cores and 16 threads with the same 3.2GHz base clock, same amounts of
L2 and L3 cache and same TDP.
The main difference is the newer 6800H can boost up to 300MHz higher, and it’s based
on 6nm whereas the 5800H is 7nm.
Both are based around AMDs zen 3 architecture though.
The older 5800H can only be used with DDR4 memory while the newer 6800H only supports
DDR5, and the 5800H supports PCIe Gen 3 while the 6800H has faster Gen 4.
To do this testing fairly I’ve used the Neo 15 from XMG, so basically the same laptop
chassis with the main difference being that one has the older Ryzen 7 5800H while the
other has the newer 6800H.
These laptops are perfect for this test because the software allows us to control the CPU
power limit very easily.
More power equals more performance, but also more heat, and of course higher power bill.
Cinebench is a good place to start our performance comparisons because it covers both single
and multi core performance.
I’ve tested with both CPUs power limited to either a 45 watt TDP, the base power level
for both processors, or 80 watts, which I think better represents what most mid to higher
end gaming laptops are capable of when the discrete graphics aren’t active.
With both power limited to 80 watts, the newer 6800H was scoring 15% higher compared to the
5800H In multi core, though the single core gains were 8% higher.
At 45 watts the 6800H was instead 16% better in multi core and 7% ahead in single core,
so pretty similar margins.
The 6800H was able to do this by hitting 10% higher clock speeds with both CPUs power limited
to 80 watts, or 12% higher at 45 watts.
This tells us that most of the multi core gains are simply due to the 6800H being able
to clock higher.
This sounds fine, but it’s only able to pull this off by using more power.
With both laptops power limited to 80 watts, the 6800H machine was drawing 16% more power
from the wall, or 12% more power at the wall with the 45 watt TDP.
I expected them to be closer together given they have the same TDP, but this wasn’t
the case.
Other things like screen brightness were the same with RGB lighting effects off and the
batteries were fully charged.
More power doesn’t appear to equal more heat here, however this is unfortunately the
only thing that’s not a fair apples to apples comparison, because the 2022 version of this
laptop has more heatpipes.
Although the 6800H should technically be more efficient thanks to TSMC’s 6nm, don’t
forget that it’s sucking down more power at the wall too.
We can see how much different power limits matter here.
I’ve got the older 5800H shown by the red bar below, and the newer 6800H shown by the
purple bar above.
These are the Cinebench R23 multicore scores with different CPU power limits set through
software.
Basically the 6800H was always ahead, though the gaps between them were a little closer
together with either very low or high power limits.
Both chips seem to scale about the same with additional power added.
I’ve compared battery life with two different laptops, the XMG Neo 15 that was used for
the previous tests in the darker purple bars and Lenovo’s Legion 5 with a smaller battery
in the lighter bars.
I chose to use two laptops because the battery life difference with the Neo 15 looked too
big, something was obviously wrong there.
The 6800H was lasting 66% longer which sounds way too good to be true, and given our Legion
5 with 5800H and smaller battery was lasting longer than the Neo 15 with 5800H, well there
must be some issue with it on battery.
The Legion 5 on the other hand lasted for 24% longer with the 6800H versus the 5800H,
which sounds more reasonable.
Both laptops with the 6800H were also performing better compared to their 5800H versions when
running on battery power, though specific differences here will vary by laptops and
how much power their batteries are able to output.
For example, the Legion 5 was only a little better on battery compared to its 5800H version,
while the Neo 15 has bigger gains compared to its older model.
So the 6800H performs better, surprising no one, but it seems to use more power in order
to do this.
At least when plugged in, because when running on battery power it does last longer compared
to the 5800H, and the 6800H also performs better when running on battery power too.
Just before we get into the games, let’s check out the differences in the rest of the
applications, as these are going to be bigger changes than what we’ll see in the games.
V-Ray is a multi threaded rendering workload, and had the biggest improvement with the newer
6800H out of all applications that I’ve tested.
We’re talking about a 19% higher score compared to the older 5800H with both power limited
at 45 watts, and then a slightly smaller 17% lead with both limited to 80 watts.
Blender is another multi core rendering workload, and again the performance gains with the 6800H
were above average compared to most other applications tested.
The classroom test was scoring 16% better on the 6800H regardless of the power limit
difference.
Lower times are better with the corona renderer, as now we’re looking at how long a render
took to complete instead of a score, and this one was only 10% better with the 6800H.
Lower times are also better in the Linux kernel compilation test, and this was run under Ubuntu
22.04 rather than Windows 11 like everything else.
Compiling generally benefits from more CPU cache, but the 5800H and 6800H have the same
amounts of cache, so we’re seeing some of the smallest performance differences here
with the 6800H only 4% faster than the 5800H.
LLVM compilation was also done in Linux, and it’s a similar deal here too with the 6800H
just 7% faster compared to the 5800H - a below average difference out of the workloads tested,
so programmers probably won’t benefit too much with the 6800H.
7-Zip was used to test compression and decompression, and is another example of where the 6800H
really isn’t offering us noteworthy improvements.
The difference in compression was the smallest out of all workloads tested, while decompression
was just 4% faster on the 6800H at 45 watts, or 5% faster at 80 watts.
Adobe Photoshop on the other hand saw an above average improvement out of the workloads tested,
with the 6800H scoring 14% higher compared to the 5800H at both power levels.
This is more than I expected, given Photoshop usually does better with more single threaded
performance, and Cinebench only saw a 7 to 8% boost there.
Lower times are better for Handbrake, as this is how long it took to export one of my 4K
laptop reviews to 1080p.
Again above average gains with the 6800H in this one, with it being around 13% faster
with both CPUs power limited to 45 watts, and going 15% faster with both at 80 watts.
Now for some Microsoft Office tests.
Whether we’re talking about Excel, Word, PowerPoint or Outlook, for general office
use the newer 6800H was a little better, but these aren’t exactly heavy workloads so
unless you’ve got some seriously big office files, it probably won’t matter.
Geekbench tests out a bunch of different workloads and aggregates a score.
The 6800H was 16% ahead in multicore here with either power limit, while single core
was 7% ahead, so very close to what we saw in Cinebench earlier.
On average out of these specific tests, with both CPUs power limit to a 45 watt TDP, AMD’s
newer Ryzen 7 6800H processor was scoring 11% higher compared to their older 5800H.
The 6800H was always ahead, as you’d expect, but as you can see here the margins could
vary quite a bit depending on the specific test.
Take 7-Zip compression down the bottom for example, this is such a small difference that
it’s basically nothing.
Meanwhile rendering performance with Blender or V-Ray up the top were 16 to 19% better
with the newer 6800H.
If we instead compare with both power limited to an 80 watt TDP, well, the 6800H still has
an 11% lead over the 5800H on average in the same selection of tests.
Both processors are of course performing better with more power now, it’s just that adding
more power scales similarly across both of them, as we saw in Cinebench R23.
Alright now for some gaming.
As the 6800H adds support for PCIe Gen 4, we’ve got twice as much bandwidth between
the CPU and GPU now compared to the 5800H which is limited to slower Gen 3.
Honestly for most games, this probably won't matter, but in some scenarios this could contribute
to the 6800H receiving an additional boost.
I won’t really be able to say which games are getting an FPS boost due to this, because
I can’t just limit the bandwidth to fairly compare it.
It's just a built in platform difference between the two, but it does also mean that 6800h
laptops can use faster gen 4 storage.
Just before we get to real gaming performance on the RTX 3060 graphics, here’s how the
integrated graphics perform in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p.
We’re looking at an 81% boost to average FPS with the newer iGPU in the 6800H, a great
improvement thanks to RDNA2, but most laptops with these H series processors will have discrete
graphics, so let’s see how those perform.
Now I need to note that unfortunately the upcoming game benchmarks we’re about to
look at won’t be perfectly fairly comparable, and this is simply because there’s a GPU
power limit difference between the Legion 5 when we’re looking at the 2021 model with
5800H, and 2022 model with 6800H.
So basically the small difference that we’re going to see might simply be down to the GPU
power limit change rather than the CPU.
Unfortunately I couldn’t use the Neo 15 to do this testing at all because I had completely
different GPUs there, so this is as good as I can do.
I’ve got both my 5800H and 6800H laptops highlighted in red in Cyberpunk 2077.
The newer 6800H was only a couple of FPS higher, but again this could be a result of the GPU
power limit difference.
Whatever the reason, it’s only a small change and not something you’d actually notice
when playing.
The difference was even smaller in Red Dead Redemption 2.
Yeah the 6800H laptop was ahead, but it’s less than a 2 FPS difference now, which is
honestly within the margin of error, so once more basically no practical difference.
There’s no real difference in Control either, though this is more of a GPU heavy game.
Even CS:GO which is a game that notoriously relies on CPU power only saw a small 5% FPS
boost with the 6800H.
It’s a bit bigger compared to the more GPU heavier games just before it, but this should
be a best case and it’s just not impressive.
Honestly based on these results, you really don’t need to spend more money to get the
6800H compared to the older 5800H.
In most cases, the difference just isn’t that big.
I had a really difficult time trying to find two laptops that were fairly comparable to
work out price difference.
But generally you would expect the newer and more powerful 6800H to cost more.
I mean it is technically better, even if not by much.
Now obviously if the price difference between the 5800H and 6800H is only small, or maybe
for some reason the 6800H is cheaper, you might as well just get the newer 6800H.
Based on what we’ve seen here, personally I don’t think I’d be willing to pay more
than say $50 or so to get the 6800H over the 5800H.
But of course with that said, there might be other differences between a 2021 and 2022
gaming laptop other than just the CPU.
Maybe the 2022 one adds advanced optimus or a MUX switch or something like that for instance.
The fact is the 5800H is still a pretty decent chip from AMD in late 2022 going into 2023.
The 6800H is only a minor refresh.
If time is money and you know that you’ll be doing tasks that utilize all cores like
rendering, then it might be worth spending the extra money to get the 6800H.
But if time is money, then I’d argue that you should instead buy a laptop with Intel’s
12th gen processors, and you can find out why in this video over here next.
I’ve fairly compared AMD’s Ryzen 7 6800H against Intel’s Core i7-12700H in the exact
same laptop chassis, so come and check out all the differences in this video next before
you buy your next laptop!