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
One possibility I haven’t seen anyone comment on. If you work for any reasonably large company then your laptop probably went through an IT department. They often strip the computer of any unnecessary software. They lock it out from any applications they don’t want on there. So it will perform better.
Firmware, Build Quality and Support
1. Each laptop needs its own code to handle all the devices on it. While drivers dictate how software talks to hardware, firmware dictates how hardware talks to other hardware. If your have poorly coded firmware, your hardware is going to spend way longer than it needs to for all the tasks given too it.
2. Build quality. The people who are spending the markup for an elitebook, want the quality that comes with it. Beyond stuff like cooling which helps with temps, they are often designed to make use of every available resource.
1. A cheap laptop is gonna use the integrated chipset for all its IO because its included and free. The downside of this is that all your IO has to share a single mediator, so if one device is busy, all the other devices have to wait. This means stuff like your keyboard, network, and storage are all fighting for their slice of the pie.
2. On the elitebook, stuff often bypasses the chipset and uses dedicated hardware. My personal elitebook has a dedicated USB3 controller and network card that gets wired into the CPU PCI-e bus, bypassing the chipset. This means my storage drive, networking, and keyboard can all operate independently of each other without having to wait on the other to finish.
3. If you have a customer paying you to directly support the device and its day-2-day business needs, you want to make sure the device behaves exactly the way you expect it too. This means ***SIGNIFICANTLY*** more resources get spent on ensuring that the bugs get worked out of the device and that all apps run on it without issue.
1. My personal elitebook gives me access to “professional” grade drivers which has been tested against industry software like the Adobe suite, AutoCAD, etc and are “certified” to be issue free. This means I can goto someone like AutoCAD, complain my app is crashing, and not be able to get blown off for “Bad Hardware/Install” as the device has been rubber-stamped as “Just works”.
One possibility is that the chips can use two kinds of RAM, DDR4-2400 or LPDDR3-2133. If your i7 came with LPDDR, it’ll run cooler and use less battery, but memory performance wil be lower.
Another possibility is SSD. Not all SSD is made the same. Some are faster than others, some layouts are faster, and some SSD controllers are faster. As an example on layouts, the Apple M2 MacBook Air 256 GB had much slower SSD performance than the M1 MacBook Air 256 GB. This was because the M1 256 GB option used two 128 GB SSD modules giving two separate data paths to the CPU, while the M2 used one 256 GB module with one data path. An M2 configured with 512 GB used two SSD modules, so the SSD performance went back up.
Aside from hardware it could also be the ISO file your company is using to load the Operating System. Mine uses a custom ISO with all the bloatware and extra crud from Microsoft removed which runs WAY faster than traditional Windows even when I’m using it on a VM on my Mac
You need to do some objective tests to see what’s precieved to be faster. From there, you can see if it’s actually faster and then narrow down what part(s) are contributing to that speed.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Latest Answers