Intel’s integrated graphics have gotten steadily better over the years, but to play games you’ll need to play at 720p resolution at Low graphics settings, or possibly Medium settings in older games. Just how boring has the performance curve of Intel’s integrated graphics been? You can see that one UHD 620 laptop is essentially the same as all the others.īut can you game on the Dell XPS 13 9380? Soft of.
The fastest is Huawei’s Matebook X Pro but it features a discrete GeForce MX150 GPU. While Dell’s new is technically faster than its predecessors in overall 3DMark Sky Diver performance, it’s really a tie, isn’t it? As you can see, they’re almost all the same except for small differences due to thermals and run-to-run variances.
In fact, the Spectre 13 isn’t the thinnest in the world anymore as Acer’s Swift 7 now claims that at 8.98mm thick, and with its Core i7-7Y75 CPU it’s even slower than the Spectre 13. Well, you don’t get there without compromises. The reason is simple: HP touted the Spectre 13 as the “thinnest laptop” in the world at just over 10mm thick. The last to cross the finish line is the HP Spectre 13, which finishes a whopping 39 percent slower than the new XPS 13 9380. Again, much of what you see here is represented by the available cooling, how much space there is for that cooling, and what the laptop maker opts to prioritize. The larger 14-inch Lenovo Yoga 920 is about 12 percent slower than the new XPS 13 9380, and the Razer Blade Stealth is 16 percent slower. The Dell and its Whiskey Lake U come in first place, but the older with its Kaby Lake R chip isn’t that far behind.
Dell tends to swing for the fences in performance and you see that reflected here. Others decide to actually let the shell of the laptop heat up too. Some laptop makers decide to crank up fan speeds or crank down clock speeds. The workload takes around an hour or more for laptops to complete.īesides measuring CPU performance, this test also lets us gauge how well laptops deal with heat.
To test a longer task, we use Handbrake 0.9.9 and transcode a 30GB 1080P MKV file using the built-in Android Tablet preset. Since laptops have limited ability to dissipate heat, their CPUs have to run at slower clocks when they’re under a sustained load. A win is a win though, and the still tops the chart.īoth of the previous loads test fairly short runs. The Kaby Lake R Core i7 is only about 13 percent slower on paper than the Whiskey Lake U. Here, the performance gap closes between the 8th-gen Kaby Lake R laptops and the 8th-gen Whiskey Lake U in the XPS 13. To get a better gauge of how Google Chrome or Microsoft Word will respond, we again rely on Cinebench, but measure performance on a single-thread.
IDGīut Cinebench R15’s view of multi-threaded performance probably doesn’t reflect much real-world usage. The vast majority of software and games that people use relay a single-thread or two-especially on a 13-inch laptop. We can attribute some of that to the new Dell design’s upgraded cooling-more cooling usually means more performance-and some to the higher clocks that the Whiskey Lake U chip can run at. As you can see, the new Dell has about a 20 percent multi-threaded performance advantage. Next page: Benchmarks continue, bottom lineįor comparison, I rounded up Cinebench scores from eight Kaby Lake R, Core i7-8550U laptops of varying sizes and shapes. Those occasional multi-threaded tasks in Excel or that rare multi-threaded Adobe Photoshop filter would likely see similar performance bumps. The test is multi-threaded and probably isn’t what most users will run, but it’s still a fair representation of what you’re likely to see from the laptop and CPU in shorter multi-threaded workloads.
It’s a free benchmark based on Maxon’s older Cinema4D rendering engine. The Dell shows just how much smaller you can make a 13-inch laptop over a much older and definitely unfashionable 13-inch laptop with wide bezels. But the biggest hit to performance, Spectre Variant 2 fixes, won’t change much. Whiskey Lake implements changes in hardware against Meltdown Variant 3 and Variant 5. Intel’s previous laptop CPUs featured security updates applied through firmware only. The other change is actual hardware mitigation against the Meltdown exploits that boiled over last year.