What is the best CPU i can get in a thin laptop?

[bigmoney]

I'm a web developer looking for a new laptop. At the moment i'm using an XPS 15 with a 8750H and am overall pretty happy. It'd be great if i can get a better CPU and preferably 32 gigs of RAM. The graphics are not important. High thread count and clock speed is what i'm looking for. The main use cases would be Node.js, Docker and various testing tools i use (Jest/Nightwatch) all of which scale nicely. TBH a 8750H is plenty, but i'm curious to see what kind of performance boost i'd get with a better CPU. 

 

The i9 MacBook Pro would be an obvious choice, but you guys are well aware of its cooling problems and i'd rather not buy an Apple device.

The ROG Strix GL702ZC with the Ryzen 7 1700 seems like a good option, but it's way too bulky for my liking.

 

Are any of you aware of a portable 15" laptop with 8 cores (and hyper threading) and cooling system to handle it? Is there anything like that launching this year?

 

 

[schwellmo92]

The only 8 core laptops are the Ryzen ones or the Clevo 9900K ones but none of them are thin, the XPS 15 is about the best you can get for the work you do.

[genexis_x]

30 minutes ago, bigmoney said:

Are any of you aware of a portable 15" laptop with 8 cores (and hyper threading) and cooling system to handle it? Is there anything like that launching this year?

Clevo P750, however it's heavy

[bigmoney]

1 hour ago, schwellmo92 said:

The only 8 core laptops are the Ryzen ones or the Clevo 9900K ones but none of them are thin, the XPS 15 is about the best you can get for the work you do.

The XPS 15 is pretty good, overall i'm happy with it, but i wouldn't call it the best. It doesn't cool that well so it gets fairly noisy under load, but performance wise it's good and i haven't experienced thermal throttling. If only it had a 1440p/4k matte screen option and better cooling would be awesome.

 

Looks like the 8-core options all use desktop CPUs so they need to be thick to cool them. Have any 8-core mobile CPUs been announced?

[genexis_x]

9 minutes ago, bigmoney said:

Have any 8-core mobile CPUs been announced

No, and I doubt that laptop cooling solution can handle that due to outdated 14nm process

[schwellmo92]

1 hour ago, bigmoney said:

The XPS 15 is pretty good, overall i'm happy with it, but i wouldn't call it the best. It doesn't cool that well so it gets fairly noisy under load, but performance wise it's good and i haven't experienced thermal throttling. If only it had a 1440p/4k matte screen option and better cooling would be awesome.

 

Looks like the 8-core options all use desktop CPUs so they need to be thick to cool them. Have any 8-core mobile CPUs been announced?

I have a matte screen protector on my XPS that gets rid of the gloss.

 

There are no 8 core mobile parts unfortunately. 

[fingerjcp]

Thermals are the biggest problem I think, hence there is no great difference between the XPS 15 i7 7850h or the i9 8950HK or even the Lenovo X1 Extremes i7 8850h.... at least for CPU intensive photo/video editing I found that the difference is minimal and varies even more between manufacturers (Dell, Apple or Lenovo) than the actual CPUs...

[bigmoney]

On 2/8/2019 at 3:58 PM, schwellmo92 said:

I have a matte screen protector on my XPS that gets rid of the gloss.

 

There are no 8 core mobile parts unfortunately. 

Thanks for the tip about the screen protector!

[Werdoe]

Hi there @bigmoney,

 

Good day to you! I see that you have a dell xps 15, ive been looking into that laptop for quite some time now, planning to buy very soon. But got some couple issue.

It seems that xps 15 lineup has some issues, its detailed in this post (if not allowed to post links, please inform me so i can remove). Have you experience these issues?

 

This is my first time spending 130,000 PHP (USD 2488.98). My hard earn money, so im a bit cautious.  

[bigmoney]

On 2/12/2019 at 1:10 AM, Werdoe said:

Hi there @bigmoney,

 

Good day to you! I see that you have a dell xps 15, ive been looking into that laptop for quite some time now, planning to buy very soon. But got some couple issue.

It seems that xps 15 lineup has some issues, its detailed in this post (if not allowed to post links, please inform me so i can remove). Have you experience these issues?

 

This is my first time spending 130,000 PHP (USD 2488.98). My hard earn money, so im a bit cautious.  

Haven't had any issues. You should be ware when spending that much money. That's why i always try to a buy from a seller that accepts returns. Buy the laptop, try it out for a couple of days/weeks and replace it with something else if you're not happy.