Why does Linus think that a 9 - 8 year old laptop is bad compared to a similar desktop?

[Ashleyyyy]

6 minutes ago, Damascus said:

Alright, so it doesn't :run at 3.1ghz"  it boosts to that

it boosts to that all the time. 

[Damascus]

29 minutes ago, Twilight said:

it boosts to that all the time. 

Doesn't really address the part about dual cores lol.

[8uhbbhu8]

I have an old 2nd gen i5 workstation laptop and even if i were to upgrade it as far as it can go with the top end cpu of the era, max out the ram, and upgrade the gpu with a bios flashed complatible one it would still be incredibly bad compared to even a $400 Ryzen based one from today. Said upgrades btw would push the toral cost of the laptop well over $800 and its totally not worth it. Such a massive difference between hw now and then

[Roswell]

Because laptop performance and reliability sucks in comparison to desktops.

 

I bought a what seems to me a pretty decent laptop a few months ago for graphics production work, among other things. It has an i7-8565u in it, 4 cores/8 threads. It still gets beat by a desktop i7-2600K from 10 years ago in benchmarks. The $150 Nvidia MX-250 I had to add for hardware acceleration (I'm not gaming on it), gets dunked on from the likes of something like a 650 Ti Boost that cost about the same... from almost 10 years ago!

 

So yeah, broadly speaking, laptops lag a decade behind in horsepower. Sure, you can spend obscene amounts on a notebook with a desktop GPU in it, but that's not really a notebook, it's a 12 pound cinder block in a backpack. Not to mention that those cards still get stomped by desktop parts because they have to strangle them with low power draw to keep thermals and battery drain in check.

 

None of this is even addressing the fact that your laptop's screen hinge can only take so many open/closes, your power jack can only be connected/disconnected so many times, your keyboard keys can only be pressed so many times, etc etc.

 

Edit: Removed the word "smashed" because people enjoy arguing over semantics rather than actual points.

[Ashleyyyy]

2 minutes ago, Vitamanic said:

Because laptop performance and reliability sucks in comparison to desktops.

 

I bought a what seems to me a pretty decent laptop a few months ago for graphics production work, among other things. It has an i7-8265u in it, 4 cores/8 threads. It STILL gets smashed by a desktop i7-2600K from 10 years ago in benchmarks.

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-2600K-vs-Intel-Core-i5-8265U/621vsm566107

 

it's exactly the same. 

 

3 minutes ago, Vitamanic said:

The $150 Nvidia MX-250 I had to add for hardware acceleration (I'm not gaming on it), gets dunked on from the likes of something like a 650 Ti Boost that cost about the same... from almost 10 years ago!

because it has to be so efficient. laptop gpu's in the past were super power hungry and ran super hot and failed all the time. these low power gpu's fail less often but that comes at a performance cost... 

[Ashleyyyy]

1 hour ago, 8uhbbhu8 said:

Such a massive difference between hw now and then

I'm comparing to hardware of the same age. so a desktop from 2011 vs a laptop from 2011.

[Roswell]

8 minutes ago, Twilight said:

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-2600K-vs-Intel-Core-i5-8265U/621vsm566107

 

it's exactly the same. 

 

because it has to be so efficient. laptop gpu's in the past were super power hungry and ran super hot and failed all the time. these low power gpu's fail less often but that comes at a performance cost... 

That site is a mess. Even if it was the same, my new laptop with it's pricey i7 is still 10 years behind compared to desktop parts. Same goes for the GPU.

 

You don't realize it, but you're answering your own question here.

[Dabombinable]

If you're using a Sandybridge laptop with some form of dedicated GPU, you can definitely play far more than Minecraft. Hell, with a 2010 Phenom II P920 (later upgraded to N970) and Mobility Radeon HD5650 1GB I could play World of Warships at 1366x768 60fps. Now if you only used the iGPU then yes, you'd be stuck playing only Minecraft.

Edit: The laptop died from physical damage btw - it was well maintained so it was never likely to die from hardware failure

[Arika]

44 minutes ago, Vitamanic said:

I bought a what seems to me a pretty decent laptop a few months ago for graphics production work, among other things. It has an i7-8265u in it, 4 cores/8 threads. It still gets smashed by a desktop i7-2600K from 10 years ago in benchmarks

the U stands for Ultra Low Voltage and you're comparing it against an unlocked mid-high end enthusiast Processor.

 

So 2 very different CPUs that cannot be directly compared, but since you went ahead and did anyway; where you're getting your information from about it "getting smashed"?

 

Passmark benchmark

17.3% increase

 

Cinebench R15 (single Core)

28.8% increase

 

 

The only benchmarks i've seen that shows the 2600k beating the 8265u is in multi-core workloads, but even then, just barely

 

Cinebench R15 (multi coore)

10.9% decrease

 

 

Bender BMW27

5% decrease

 

With that said, 15w/25w (base/boost) vs 95w. so the fact that it's using 4-5 times less power and still better overall in terms of performance, it pretty damn good. U series processors are not meant to be power houses. 8 years (not 10) gets you a massive efficiency boost for the for the same (if not better) performance.

 

Hell, in terms of browsing and "normal" workloads, i cannot tell the difference between my laptop with an undervolted and turbo disabled 7200u and my desktop with an overclocked 7600k (4.7Gz).

 

[Roswell]

36 minutes ago, Arika S said:

the U stands for Ultra Low Voltage and you're comparing it against an unlocked mid-high end enthusiast Processor.

 

So 2 very different CPUs that cannot be directly compared, but since you went ahead and did anyway; where you're getting your information from about it "getting smashed"?

 

Passmark benchmark

17.3% increase

 

Cinebench R15 (single Core)

28.8% increase

 

 

The only benchmarks i've seen that shows the 2600k beating the 8265u is in multi-core workloads, but even then, just barely

 

Cinebench R15 (multi coore)

10.9% decrease

 

 

Bender BMW27

5% decrease

 

With that said, 15w/25w (base/boost) vs 95w. so the fact that it's using 4-5 times less power and still better overall in terms of performance, it pretty damn good. U series processors are not meant to be power houses. 8 years (not 10) gets you a massive efficiency boost for the for the same (if not better) performance.

 

Hell, in terms of browsing and "normal" workloads, i cannot tell the difference between my laptop with an undervolted and turbo disabled 7200u and my desktop with an overclocked 7600k (4.7Gz).

 

I have an i7-8565u, I mistyped. It gets beat because most people aren't running K series stuff at stock, especially not back then with Sandy Bridge. Maybe going for a 7 year behind the curve comparison with Haswell would have been a better comparison, but I'm sure you'd just nitpick something else anyway.

 

I'm also not dumb and understand why lower wattage parts perform less. If you had bothered reading the rest of my post, you'd realize that.

 

Regardless, the entire basis of your response is irrelevant as OP asked WHY laptops don't age as well. Well, a good reason is because they start out about 10 years behind. 

[Underi]

Might as well throw my experiences here.

I've owned only 4 laptops in my life, so it might be a bit small sample size, but two of those 4 laptops have failed, both of them had a dedicated GPU, and both had the GPU die. It also most likely was due to high temperatures, in both cases. Even after changing thermal paste and cleaning the fan and the heatsink, both of them would constantly be at ~80C idle and sound like jet engines.

One was an Asus laptop from 2009, the other a high-end HP laptop from 2014.

 

The two that have survived are a Lenovo laptop with a Celeron CPU and iGPU and an Asus laptop with an i3 and iGPU, from 2014 and 2018 respectively. Since I don't have any experiences with newer laptops running a dedicated GPU, I won't say anything about that but if you ask me the laptops from early 2010s and late 2000s definitely are more likely to die if they do have a dedicated GPU, since they're so inefficient and run at high temperatures.