- 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. What does matter is this segue
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25% off at the link below. (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. You know what never
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3080 Mobile is Complicated", because making an informed decision while buying a laptop
now is shockingly tough.
Desktop 10nm when...
Bois it's proved. Tiger LAKE IS AN ACTUALLY TIGER OF THE MOBILE CPU WORLD.
The 11980HK is a beast when it comes in a good chassis.
Honestly, this is a showcase of how much of a joke it is to pursue high performance on a laptop form factor; All of the manufacturers think that consumers are idiots and with just reason.
Oh nice
Intel is priming up!! It’s gonna get gooooood!
Still lots of problems Intel needs to figure out to be competitive again with AMD mobile chips. Hopefully they can do it so the consumers can benefit on both sides.
FINALLY! It makes me so happy to see Intel and AMD neck and neck, and trading blows, for the first time in forever. I never thought something like this would make me feel joy, but here we are.
It's interesting that Intel thinks that thin and light box is what reviewers should look at. Thin and light, high performance gaming laptops don't feel worth the tradeoffs to me, and certainly LTT's testing bears that out. I really wonder who wants that product.