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
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.
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
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.
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 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.
Latest Answers