Why would a weaker business laptop, outperform a consumer laptop with better hardware?

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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

15 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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