- I'll take notes.
We left off at implementing an open
and transparent policy for the hom-
What? This?
- What is it?
- I need it for work!
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 gigahertz,
a 4K 144 Hertz 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 gonna 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 gonna 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.
Fast like the segue to our sponsor.
- Gorgias, Gorgias is a customer support platform
that aims to revolutionize the way businesses interact
with their customers.
They can respond to inquiries through a variety
of methods all through a single, unified dashboard.
Check out our Gorgias using the link below.
- There have always been laptops that aspired
to desktop-tier performance.
Some even when 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 bright 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 U Series 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 wanna get done is gaming at max settings,
which I do.
For our testing, we used the latest MSI Titan GT77.
Mainly because we happen 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 gonna have both models and more linked down below
if you wanna 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 GPU-bound titles
compared to our older 3080TI-equipped GT77.
MSI is feeding the 4090 the maximum permitted 175 watts
when you include Dynamic Boost.
Netting us again of between 30 to 35% in Hitman 3,
F122 and Cyberpunk 2077
with Red Dead Redemption 2 seeing a 49% increase
and Assassins Creed: Valhalla jumping by a whopping 60%.
Temperature stayed reasonable while gaming too.
73 degrees is around five more than the 12th gen laptop,
but our core clocks were also 400 megahertz 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 in salt 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 sea seafarer 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 in NVIDIA's fault?
Maybe the 139080HX isn't all as 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, 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 chonky 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 like 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 Desk Pads,
a simple, all-black look
and the same excellent micro-texture cloth
means you need to go to lttstore.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 7-zip 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 last gen laptop one.
And while Y-cruncher and handbrake 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 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 low-profile cherry AMX switches with numpad,
a factory calibrated, VESA certified HDR display
and high-speed 2.5 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 FLAC audio encode only a single second slower
than its desktop counterpart
and seven 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 3,200.
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 Procyon,
Premiere, and Photoshop.
So for the folks who need these machines,
whether it's for heavy scientific applications in the field,
visual effects for our 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 gonna 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.
Interesting like this message from our sponsor.
- Gizmogo!
Chances are you've got some old electronics
just collecting dust somewhere.
It's okay. Gizmogo knows this.
So they came up with a simple and hassle-free way
to sell your old or broken devices.
All you need to do is select your device on their website,
answer a few questions about its condition,
and get an instant free quote.
Once you've accepted the offer,
Gizmogo will send you a prepaid shipping label
so you can ship your device to them for free.
And what does Gizmogo do with all these products?
They refurbish and reuse as many devices as possible,
giving them a new lease on life and reducing e-waste.
So if you're looking to declutter your home
and get some extra cash
while also doing your part for the environment,
Gizmogo is the perfect solution for you.
Visit the link below
and see how much you can get for your old tech devices.
- 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 Celeron.
Did it even have dedicated graphics?
I don't think so. Yeah, no.