Which CPU is better in a laptop?
The i7-7700HQ or newer i5-8300H from Intel?
We’ll find out in this video with a series of gaming and application benchmarks to see
how they perform, and discuss the differences between them to help you decide which you
should buy in your next laptop.
Earlier this year Intel launched their new 8th generation Coffee Lake laptop CPUs, which
for the first time from Intel gives us up to 6 cores in a laptop.
Previously to this the i7 7700HQ CPU seemed to be commonplace in most of the laptops I
tested, so when I found out that the 8th generation had a quad core i5 CPU with higher clock speeds
I just had to compare them.
As mentioned both are 4 core chips with 8 threads and a 45 watt TDP, and that’s where
the important similarities end.
Perhaps the most important differences is the clock speeds.
The 7700HQ has a higher base clock however the 8300H has a higher turbo clock speed,
essentially meaning it should perform better assuming you’ve got no throttling preventing
the boost speeds from being reached.
There’s only a 200MHz difference between single core speeds, but the all core turbo
speed differences is much larger at 500MHz.
The 8300H also has 2MB of extra cache which should help it out as well.
How much of a performance difference does this make practically?
To test this I’ve run some CPU specific benchmarks on two different laptops with these
processors to find out.
The 7700HQ was tested in the Alienware 13, while the 8300H was tested in the MSI GV62
8RE.
Both laptops had two 8gb sticks of DDR4 memory running at 2,400MHz in dual channel in all
tests to make them as similar as possible, although it’s worth noting the 8th gen CPUs
do support speeds up to 2,666MHz which would further improve results.
Both laptops also have Nvidia 1060 6GB graphics which ran at similar clock speeds under stress
test, so overall the laptops are fairly similar in terms of overall specs, with the exception
of the CPU of course.
We’ll first start off with the gaming results and then check out some different applications
afterwards.
Starting out with Fortnite the 7700HQ actually seemed ahead at lower settings, but at higher
settings the 8300H pulled out ahead, performing almost 13% better at ultra settings, but keep
in mind no tests in this game are equal, as it greatly depends on what’s going on in
game at the time, I tried my best to make them similar but there’s always going to
be variance.
Overwatch was playing perfectly fine at epic settings on both laptops in my opinion, but
with the 8300H we’re seeing an 8% performance improvement in average frame rates at epic
settings compared to the 7700HQ, and a 15% improvement in 1% lows.
In PUBG testing with the same replay we’re seeing less of a difference between the two
here, just 6% or so better on the averages with the 8300H at ultra settings, but perhaps
most importantly a 13% improvement on the 1% lows.
CS:GO ran nicely on both and received a 16% improvement to average frame rates at max
settings with the 8300H in use, and a 10% improvement to the 1% lows.
Dota 2 was tested using a fairly intensive replay designed to represent a worst case
scenario, and at ultra settings the 8300H is about 6% ahead of the 7700HQ.
Ghost Recon is a resource intensive game and was tested with the built in benchmark, at
ultra settings we’re seeing over a 12% improvement with the 8300H, and almost 15% better in the
1% lows.
Watchdogs 2 is another somewhat resource intensive game, and with the 8300H CPU in use we’re
able to run over 16% better at ultra settings, and 19% better in terms of 1% lows.
Rise of the Tomb Raider was tested with the built in benchmark, and at maximum settings
the 8300H averaged more than 10% better than the 7700HQ in this test.
Shadow of War was also tested with the built in benchmark with fairly similar results,
at ultra settings the 8300H is scoring around 9% better.
I would have liked to have used more CPU demanding games, but I did test these laptops at different
times, so these are the results I had available.
In almost all cases the 8300H CPU was out ahead, but in some games at some setting levels
it was quite close so it can depend.
On average at max settings throughout all of the games tested the 8300H was scoring
over 11% better in average frame rates.
While running the games on the 7700HQ most of them were averaging 3.4GHz on all CPU cores,
while the 8300H was averaging just under 3.9GHz on all cores, so that’s almost a 15% clock
speed increase, granted typically at higher graphical settings we’d be less CPU limited
in most of these games anyway.
Now let’s move away from gaming and into the application testing.
In these more CPU intensive tests both CPUs were undervolted by -0.150v to ensure there
was no power limit or thermal throttling taking place to give us the full power of each CPU.
Handbrake was used to encode a 4K video file to 1080p, and then a separate 1080p video
file to 720p using the HQ presets.
There’s a small boost with the 8300H completing the 4K task almost 6% faster and around 10%
of an improvement on the 1080p file.
In the V-Ray CPU benchmark the 8300H was able to complete the task around 11% faster than
the 7700HQ.
I’ve used Veracrypt to test the AES encryption and decryption speeds, and the 8300H is performing
around 10% faster for encryption and 13% better for decryption.
The 7-Zip benchmark was used to demonstrate the decompression and compression speeds of
both CPUs, and again like Veracrypt we’re seeing a little boost with the 8300H giving
us a 12% improvement in compression and around a 9% improvement for decompression.
In Cinebench I’ve tested both single and multi core performance, each test was run
5 times and these are the average numbers, and there’s an 11% improvement in single
core and a 9% improvement in multicore with the 8300H.
A similar pattern was seen in Geekbench, with the 8300H receiving a 9% improvement in single
core performance and an 11% boost in the multicore test.
Passmark 9 resulted in the 8300H scoring 15% higher in the single core test, and 11% higher
in multicore.
The Corona benchmark renders a scene using the CPU, and was a bit quicker on the 8300H
CPU as expected, around 8% faster.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to test Adobe Premiere as I had some sort of issue with
the encoding on the 8300H laptop that I wasn’t able to troubleshoot prior to having to sending
it back.
Overall throughout all of these applications tested on average we’re seeing over a 10%
performance improvement, so in both gaming and just general applications the 8300H is
the clear winner here, pretty impressive considering it’s an i5 in this latest generation which
is able to smack down the king of laptop CPUs from the previous 7th generation.
Which CPU should you get in a laptop?
If possible I’d definitely recommend the 8300H, but of course price is an important
factor too, and I’ve actually seen some pretty good discounts on older 7th gen laptops,
so if you can get a good deal you’re not actually missing out on too much performance,
you’ll still have a great machine for years to come in my opinion.
If you’ve already got a laptop with a 7700HQ CPU it’s not really worth upgrading to the
8300H as the performance increase just doesn’t justify buying a whole new laptop, unfortunately
as both CPUs are soldered to the motherboard they can’t be upgraded independently.
I haven’t tested the differences in battery performance or temperatures, as both laptops
are from completely different companies and have different sized batteries as well as
different cooling solutions, so it wouldn’t be a fair comparison.
So what did you guys think about the differences in performance between Intel’s 7700HQ and
8300H CPUs?
I think it’s pretty cool that the i5 CPUs in the 8th gen beat the i7’s we had in the
7th gen, and although the 8300H does come out slightly ahead in all tests, the 7700HQ
still puts up a good fight.
Be sure to let me know your thoughts down in the comments, and leave a like if you found
the comparison useful.
Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this
one.