Hello all,
I just started work and received and HP EliteBook with an 8th generation i5, my previous old computer was a HP Pavilion with an 8th generation i7. The EliteBook is much faster, although it has definitely seen more usage, has not been constantly been placed on a cooling rack like mine, and I completely factory reset mine every year, why is that?
Also please note I have went to benchmarking websites and have seen that the processor on the i7 should be faster (i7-8565U vs i5 8265U).
Thanks!
Edit: They both have SSD’s and both have 16GB of ram, the Pavilion has an MX250 GPU while the EliteBook has a UHD 620 onboard graphics
In: Technology
Is your business laptop connecting to a workplace virtual machine running on a fast server perhaps?
CPU is only one factor in how “fast” a computer feels in real-world usage. More/faster RAM and SDD vs. HDD, as well as a better GPU are all noticeable differences – how do those compare between the two machines?
I’m a data analyst and my company gave me an engineering laptop. Has 128GB RAM and an nVidia ADA 200 business class gpu (equivalent of a 4060).
Hi!
I’m guessing since it’s compared within the same generation, it’s true that the i7 is faster.
Both has the same 4 cores 8 threads, but i7 has more cache.
Then i was curious about the specification (not sure if it’s the latest spec), both runs an SSD, so it’s down to RAM.
The elitebook has more options on how many GB of RAM you wanted(8/16/32 GB), but the pavilion only has 8 GB of RAM.
My guess is, even though the HP EliteBook has an i5, it has higher RAM which it can process more task compared to the hp pavilion with i7 and 8GB of RAM. Maybe you can add another 8gb of RAM into the pavilion and it could be faster than the elitebook.
There could be many answers, but the main limitation of laptops – all else being equal – is power and heat. The i7 is able to perform better than the i5 only if it is constantly supplied at least the same amount of power and is kept at the same temperature.
Your old machine had an MX250 GPU, which means that, if they both were to use the same amount of power (say, 45W), those 45W would be split between the i7 and the MX250. Your new machine has an integrated graphics that is very low power, so its usage is nearly insignificant. It’s possible that the MX250 would produce enough heat in some scenarios so as to harm the i7 performance, or that the machine as a whole was built to accommodate the MX250 and so the CPU isn’t even allowed to “turbo” as often in order to maintain enough headroom for the MX250. This is in fact a thing that is known to happen in laptops with MX series cards.
If the EliteBook has a stronger power adapter and is able to use and deal with the heat from the extra power while the old machine left the CPU starving for power, it will outperform the i7.
Things like thermal design can limit the system performance. Overheating might lead to reduced performance. Your company IT might have optimized it a bit by disabling background processes or cut down bloatware.
Firstly, this post will probably be removed as any answer will be speculative.
My answer: Background processes most likely. Most users install many things on their own laptop that are not installed on a work laptop. In my case I always have Discord open and frequently Steam and Battle.net and a game, and my various browser tabs, and my LED manager, and my 3rd party AV.
A work computer would have probably be using Windows Defender, Microsoft Office apps and some browser tabs and maybe some other low-overhead software in many cases.
Alternative answers: faulty hardware, component batch variation, motherboard bus speed, differing RAM clock speed, disk read/write differences, thermal issues, viruses, Windows Home vs Professional (I’m reaching with this one), differing system preferences, differing peripheral setups, and I’m sure plenty more.
Lots can go goofy with computers and only you have the information to determine which option(s) it may be.
Honestly it could be a well optimized environment (operating system etc) that can make the difference. What tasks/aspects are you comparing between the two?
What do you mean “much faster” and “outperforms”? What benchmarks are you using to compare the two?
It depends on what you’re doing. There could be a number of different reasons, hardware and software related.
CPU’s being faster is only relevant to what you’re doing. Single Core speeds vs multicore speeds. Some things do work in parallel vs single core speeds, so it could be CPU variations in that if you’re doing the same processing, or it could be that you’re doing 2 different operations (single vs multi) with similar CPU’s.
Likewise GPU’s have varying things about them such as cache size and GDDR5 vs GDDR6, the benchmarks you’re getting aren’t necessarily speeds, but a score on how good they are, one GPU might be better at something and be faster but it can’t do everything like the other, which would result in a lower score for the faster GPU, because the other GPU has more capability.
Additionally there are speed differences in RAM and in SSD’s.
Lastly it can be software related. Traditionally consumer products have bloatware which can slow your computer down considerably, whereas business computer may not have all of that pre-installed. Generally, whenever I have a pre-configured laptop I will do a fresh clean install of Windows to remove any and all bloatware that is not possible to uninstall.
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