- Hey, guys, this is Austin.
Odds are you're watching this video
on a laptop very similar to this,
a nearly five-year old HP Pavilion.
So for this one, I've teamed up with Intel,
who are not only sponsoring this video,
but an entire series on the channel taking a look
at how technology is changing over the next couple of years.
So one of the first thing I'm really
curious about is where we are today.
And, of course, what better way of doing that
than to compare two very similar laptops
spread out over nearly five years.
This is the HP Pavilion x360 two-in-one.
As it's powered by an eight-gen Core i7 processor,
it's going to be powerful, although
by no means some giant workstation.
But importantly it is going to be good
for the price, and even more importantly
than that, it is going to be a very close match
to our older HP Pavilion setup.
Put these two side-by-side and
the family resemblance is clear.
So the Pavilion Touchsmart was one of the very first
Windows 8 laptops that did come standard with a touchscreen.
And it actually does a lot of things right,
although if you take a look at the brand new
Pavilion x360, there have been a lot
of upgrades and changes over the last few years.
The real question is whether you actually need to upgrade.
So if you take a look at this older system,
it doesn't seem that old, and to be fair,
it still can do some basic stuff like web browsing.
It's not like it's going to be completely unusable,
but when you step over to a newer system
with the Core i7, with the Optane memory,
you're going to be getting a much, much better experience.
You're getting pretty much everything
you would expect on a modern laptop.
So stuff like USB 3.0 is here,
you're going to be getting a fourth-gen Core i5,
which is going to give you decent battery life
and okay performance, and you're even going
to be getting some extras like a DVD drive
if you're still living in 1999.
Actually, nah, that's not fair, right?
2005 was really the peak of DVD.
This guy is rocking a 15.6 inch, 1366 by 768 panel.
Now, it wasn't a terrible screen when it first came out,
but put it side-by-side with a 2018 Pavilion
and there is a huge difference.
Not only is the screen quality itself
going to be much nicer on this guy,
but having a full 1080p resolution makes a big difference.
With this guy being limited to stuff
like 720p video and sort of very little screen real estate,
it feels kind of claustrophobic in 2018.
Realistically, the screen is actually one
of the most noticeable differences.
Having a nice quality 1080p panel
does make a big difference.
And while the other one is going to be a touchscreen,
this is going to be a much more accurate touchscreen.
You also have the HP pen if you wanna use stylus input.
And one of my favorite party tricks is
that you can actually can flip the entire thing around
and treat it like a giant tablet.
Now, of course, this is going to be a 15.6 inch tablet,
so you should temper your expectations
for how portable it's going to be,
but this, especially when you pair it with the stylus,
does make a nice difference when you can, you know,
actually use it with one hand as opposed
to something like that, which doesn't, well.
Think it's kinda self-explanatory how
close that comes to being a tablet.
Now, of course, your mileage is going to vary
on something like this, but I actually do find
that the pen can be useful in some situations.
For example, if you wanna work on some graphics stuff,
if you wanna make some notes, or especially
for people who wanna have something that's going
to be a little more ergonomic.
The touch screen paired with a pen can feel
a lot better than sitting with a mouse and keyboard all day.
When it comes time to upgrade your computer,
one of the biggest questions is always
going to be to do with performance.
So when you're looking at such a wide range
of years between these two laptops,
obviously there are going to be some major differences,
but some things are also going to be very similar.
Both are currently rocking 12 gigabytes of RAM,
as well as a one terabyte hard drive,
but look a little bit closer and there
are going to be some major, major changes.
In the last few years, Intel Core processors
have seen some major leaps in performance.
Consider that we're going from a
dual-core 2.7 gigahertz boost clock all the way up
to a quad-core chip that can go
all the way up to 4 gigahertz on boost.
Now, that is really impressive,
especially when you consider that
that's all going to be in the same 15-watt TDP.
Essentially, for the same amount of power,
we're going to be doing a lot more work much, much faster.
You're also getting a smaller, thinner and lighter PC
in pretty much every aspect that not only does have
that more powerful processor, but you're also going
to be getting dedicated graphics as an option.
When you put it together, what essentially
you're getting here is something that's going
to be smaller, thinner, lighter, and more powerful
on pretty much any way that you measure it.
A lot of it has to do with the processor.
Now, don't get me wrong, it's not like a fourth-gen Core
is suddenly some archaic piece of old technology,
but things have advanced a lot and it is very noticeable
when you put them side by side.
Now, yes, it is very, very noticeable when it comes
to stuff like gaming and video editing, as you would expect,
but even for normal tasks, there's a big difference.
I mean, something as simple as opening up a webpage
can take a lot longer on the older system.
And that's something that stuff like benchmarks
don't really quite get across always.
When it comes to stuff like editing 4K video,
more performance is always going to be helpful.
Now, no, this is not going to be some giant, thick
workstation-class massive editing laptop,
but what you are getting here is a solid amount
of power, especially when you compare
it to the five-year old system.
That eighth-gen Core processor is also going to be,
of course, capable of playing back 4K video, whether
on the internal laptop screen if you've got a 4K display,
or on an external monitor, but something else
that sort of backs up this Pavilion is going
to be the dedicated AMD Radeon 530 graphics.
Now this opens you up for some light virtual reality
and mixed reality use, but almost more importantly than
that, you could do some light gaming on this guy, as well.
Now, of course, this is not going
to be a great dedicated gaming PC.
For that, you're going to want some better graphics
than the Radeon 530 in this particular system,
but the important things is the
Core i7 can definitely handle it.
So even when you pair it with something
like an Nvidia MX150, as I've done in previous videos,
you're going to be getting some much better performance,
and something that could definitely hold up.
And with the idea that you can go
with stuff like Thunderbolt solutions
to get you even better external graphics options,
having a powerful processor is very important.
Intel Optane memory is an interesting piece
of tech that I'm actually going to go much
more in-depth on in a future video,
but the basic idea is that it functions similarly
to an SSD cache, but it allows you to get the
full responsiveness of an SSD while still not
losing the full-size capacity of a hard-drive.
So this is going to speed up things,
such as opening up Windows, some of your major programs.
And it's also going to be useful for more creative
applications, such as when you're photo and video editing,
you're going to have that super-fast SSD cache,
which is all going to be working in the background.
This is one of the clearest differences
between a newer and older system.
There are so many more possibilities with this,
whereas with the older computer you
basically get what you get.
In just a few years, we've gone from thin and light laptops
being able to do basic tasks reasonably well,
to having a lot more power to the point
where you can do gaming on these.
You can do photo editing, and you can
do proper video editing on something
that is going to be this small, this thin, and this light.
I know this video was sponsored by Intel, but these
new eighth-gen Core processors are a legit game-changer.
Having this level of performance in such a thin and light
laptop just wasn't possible all that long ago.
And it's hard for me to imagine much
of a better time to upgrade than now.