April 18th, 2020 at 7:57 PM
I've recently ordered a new Thinkpad which should be arriving near the end of April if all goes well.
It's more or less a maxed out E595, only things that aren't maxed are:
See, that's what interests me. One of the reasons I bought my current laptop way back when, was because it had a dedicated GPU chip, not just the usual Intel UHD 620 or whatever was common at the time. This had an Nvidia 940M, and Nvidia being a decent company in terms of performance, it HAD to be good. So I bought it, needed a new computer for school anyway and didn't have much time to do all the research in the world.
The one I'm getting now only has integrated graphics with the Ryzen7: Vega 10.
According to Passmark, it's on the (very) low end of "high-end" cards, still doing about 6x worse than the relatively cheap <200$ GTX 1060 you can buy anywhere nowadays.
But, strangely enough, it's still rated about 50% better than the 940M.
Funnily enough, I don't doubt it at all.
Japanese and Korean people buy the most Thinkpads in the world, I'm pretty sure (literally try to find Thinkpad reviews on YouTube and I shit you not 90% of the results are in JP or KR) and since both computer cultures there are relatively big on the gaming scene, most reviews I saw online had some sort of gaming demo in them by just pointing the camera at the screen.
And it looked alright. Not great, not terrible. Could play MW Remaster without too many hiccups at medium settings. Could play Fortnite 1080 60FPS on High, even though that's not really a good benchmark, I'm pretty sure my phone could as well.
Either way, one of the main issues I had with the current HP is that the thing would get HOT. I mean, boiling water no problem. GPU would get to 80C (176F) in a couple minutes playing almost anything on super low settings and lower resolution options. Then, it would throttle, shut down, go down to 1-2FPS for a good 10-15seconds, slowly go back to normal, then rinse & repeat. The worst part is, with this card and this CPU (7500U, U as in LOCKED) I can't change any options like voltage, so I can't underclock it to keep temps down. I can't overclock it to make it actually be useful. I can't remove throttling restrictions because, well, that would probably melt the case, but also because it would simply lock me out of those options to change any aspect of how the CPU operated.
So I decided my run with Intel+Nvidia has reached its end, and picked up this new Thinkpad.
In CAD... (1.35 * USD)
I paid 1250$+tax (total: $1400) for this HP.
I paid 1000$+tax (total: $1120) for the Thinkpad.
Pretty massive savings already. Keep in mind the HP is just over two years old now. Warranty expired not long ago.
But, usually when you pay more for something, you get a better quality product in return.
Maybe the HP is still going to be faster than the Thinkpad. Maybe Intel really does dominate the market of CPUs for a reason (that's probably going to drastically change this year, mind you.) Maybe this Vega 10 will actually be terrible, despite the Passmark numbers.
So, I've decided I'll be running my own tests.
As an added bonus, I'll also benchmark my old Acer that I'm using until the Thinkpad arrives.
I want to see how much laptops scam nowadays versus the actual sheer performance numbers.
I got the Acer as a Xmas gift from my parents back when I was like 13 or something. They got tired of me using the computer to play games or having to reinstall Windows because kiddo me would download 'free music' with a .exe extension.
Thus, finding the price might be difficult, but maybe we have the receipt somewhere, or I can approximate its cost based on what old reviews said about very similar machines. At the very least, I could give my own appraisal of what it's worth today in terms of performance. I'm expecting AT LEAST a few 100.
THE TESTS:
First, I'll be using UserBenchMark since it's probably the easiest to actually run tests with, and takes no more than two minutes.
Then, ideally I also want to run PCMark 10 to get an idea of day-to-day use for productivity. It's got a basic free version that gives me scores, so that's nice.
Finally, to benchmark graphics performance, I'm gonna use three things:
1. 3DMark (Basic, Fire Strike + Night Raid).
2. Unigine Valley
3. Unigine Heaven
I've never really used 3DMark in the past, but it also gives a straight score.
But, Unigine's Heaven benchmark has always shown me straight up how shitty my GPU was, so that'll be nice just to see what framerates are like, how many straight up get dropped, when it performs better, when worse, etc.
Finally, Unigine Valley is just fun. I'd straight up walk around in it for hours on end when I was younger and listen to some cool music. Just gotta enjoy its own beauty. But, yeah, it's a pretty cool benchmark too, especially for how many polygons it's got.
Now, that's all Windows stuff, but my last (bonus), laptop runs Linux exclusively (remember when I installed Debian a few days ago?)
None of the above benchmarking tools work on Linux, sadly, but there's another option I can use that will just spit out a number for me to use: GeekBench.
It's also proprietary/paid, but that's whatever. There's a free version I can use, and it's not an install, just some binaries you download so I'm not too concerned about it taking over my system.
So I'll run GeekBench on all machines to get an idea of how well old tech holds up against new.
SPECS:
Remind me to never make a table again. I think I'm dying.
NOTES:
* - Their site lists it as a Duo, but it spoofs itself under Linux to make it look like it's a quad core, rather than appearing as 2C4T, it's spoofed to 4C4T under /dev.
** - Although the RAM spec. is actually 2666MHz, the CPU only supports up to 2400MHz in its factory settings state. I may overclock to make this worthwhile, may as well. Also note that it's a single module, so I won't be able to take advantage of the dual-channel performance boost (roughly 20% based on other tests.)
*** - It comes with an HDD. I'll be throwing an SSD in later. I'll update if necessary.
**** - I don't know the exact model, but I'm pretty sure it's 4000-series, even though old reviews I've found online mention 3000-series. Then again, their reviews also mention the Nvidia 630M, so it sounds like a slightly different model, or maybe they bought the year later.
***** - Don't know the clock speed either, but it's probably somewhere around 1200-1600MHz.
The drive is probably the most useless part of this benchmarking series, since it's the easiest to swap out anyway PLUS UBM gave me a +460% for the HP NVMe.
In other words, nothing will beat it. I'm pretty sure that's what actually saved its overall score, just how fast the drive was compared to everything else.
Even if I can max out the SATA speeds in other computers, that little NVME is still going to be a good 3x faster after looking at its CrystalDiskMark grades. No exaggeration there.
I'll begin posting benchmarks tomorrow once I have some spare time, and hopefully won't be too high. I've run the tests before already just to make sure they work, and I need to fix UBM a bit first since there's some slight issues with using dual GPUs (i.e. 940M + UHD.)
It's more or less a maxed out E595, only things that aren't maxed are:
- RAM, since one 16GB module is enough to get me through the day and I can buy a used 16GB SODIMM for like 50$ on ebay to get the dual channel benefits
- Drives, 1TB HDD is good enough because there's room for a second drive, and I've got like 5 SSDs lying around that I can pop in.
See, that's what interests me. One of the reasons I bought my current laptop way back when, was because it had a dedicated GPU chip, not just the usual Intel UHD 620 or whatever was common at the time. This had an Nvidia 940M, and Nvidia being a decent company in terms of performance, it HAD to be good. So I bought it, needed a new computer for school anyway and didn't have much time to do all the research in the world.
The one I'm getting now only has integrated graphics with the Ryzen7: Vega 10.
According to Passmark, it's on the (very) low end of "high-end" cards, still doing about 6x worse than the relatively cheap <200$ GTX 1060 you can buy anywhere nowadays.
But, strangely enough, it's still rated about 50% better than the 940M.
Funnily enough, I don't doubt it at all.
Japanese and Korean people buy the most Thinkpads in the world, I'm pretty sure (literally try to find Thinkpad reviews on YouTube and I shit you not 90% of the results are in JP or KR) and since both computer cultures there are relatively big on the gaming scene, most reviews I saw online had some sort of gaming demo in them by just pointing the camera at the screen.
And it looked alright. Not great, not terrible. Could play MW Remaster without too many hiccups at medium settings. Could play Fortnite 1080 60FPS on High, even though that's not really a good benchmark, I'm pretty sure my phone could as well.
Either way, one of the main issues I had with the current HP is that the thing would get HOT. I mean, boiling water no problem. GPU would get to 80C (176F) in a couple minutes playing almost anything on super low settings and lower resolution options. Then, it would throttle, shut down, go down to 1-2FPS for a good 10-15seconds, slowly go back to normal, then rinse & repeat. The worst part is, with this card and this CPU (7500U, U as in LOCKED) I can't change any options like voltage, so I can't underclock it to keep temps down. I can't overclock it to make it actually be useful. I can't remove throttling restrictions because, well, that would probably melt the case, but also because it would simply lock me out of those options to change any aspect of how the CPU operated.
So I decided my run with Intel+Nvidia has reached its end, and picked up this new Thinkpad.
In CAD... (1.35 * USD)
I paid 1250$+tax (total: $1400) for this HP.
I paid 1000$+tax (total: $1120) for the Thinkpad.
Pretty massive savings already. Keep in mind the HP is just over two years old now. Warranty expired not long ago.
But, usually when you pay more for something, you get a better quality product in return.
Maybe the HP is still going to be faster than the Thinkpad. Maybe Intel really does dominate the market of CPUs for a reason (that's probably going to drastically change this year, mind you.) Maybe this Vega 10 will actually be terrible, despite the Passmark numbers.
So, I've decided I'll be running my own tests.
As an added bonus, I'll also benchmark my old Acer that I'm using until the Thinkpad arrives.
I want to see how much laptops scam nowadays versus the actual sheer performance numbers.
I got the Acer as a Xmas gift from my parents back when I was like 13 or something. They got tired of me using the computer to play games or having to reinstall Windows because kiddo me would download 'free music' with a .exe extension.
Thus, finding the price might be difficult, but maybe we have the receipt somewhere, or I can approximate its cost based on what old reviews said about very similar machines. At the very least, I could give my own appraisal of what it's worth today in terms of performance. I'm expecting AT LEAST a few 100.
THE TESTS:
First, I'll be using UserBenchMark since it's probably the easiest to actually run tests with, and takes no more than two minutes.
Then, ideally I also want to run PCMark 10 to get an idea of day-to-day use for productivity. It's got a basic free version that gives me scores, so that's nice.
Finally, to benchmark graphics performance, I'm gonna use three things:
1. 3DMark (Basic, Fire Strike + Night Raid).
2. Unigine Valley
3. Unigine Heaven
I've never really used 3DMark in the past, but it also gives a straight score.
But, Unigine's Heaven benchmark has always shown me straight up how shitty my GPU was, so that'll be nice just to see what framerates are like, how many straight up get dropped, when it performs better, when worse, etc.
Finally, Unigine Valley is just fun. I'd straight up walk around in it for hours on end when I was younger and listen to some cool music. Just gotta enjoy its own beauty. But, yeah, it's a pretty cool benchmark too, especially for how many polygons it's got.
Now, that's all Windows stuff, but my last (bonus), laptop runs Linux exclusively (remember when I installed Debian a few days ago?)
None of the above benchmarking tools work on Linux, sadly, but there's another option I can use that will just spit out a number for me to use: GeekBench.
It's also proprietary/paid, but that's whatever. There's a free version I can use, and it's not an install, just some binaries you download so I'm not too concerned about it taking over my system.
So I'll run GeekBench on all machines to get an idea of how well old tech holds up against new.
SPECS:
Code:
| HP Envy x360 | Thinkpad E595 | Acer Aspire 5755G
==========================================================================================================
CPU | Intel 7500U, Up to 3.5GHz, FAKE Quad * | AMD Ryzen7 3700U, Up to 4.0GHz, Quad | Intel 2670QM, 3.1GHz Quad
GPU | Nvidia 940M + Intel 620 UHD | AMD Radeon Vega 10 (Integrated) | Nvidia GT540M + Intel UHD ****
RAM | 12GB DDR4 (2133MHz, 4GB Sol. + 8GB Mod.) | 16GB DDR4 (2400MHz) ** | 8GB DDR3 Sol. *****
Screen | 1080P, 60Hz, 17", Touch | 1080P, 60Hz, 15.6" | 1366x768, 60Hz, 15.6"
Disk | 512GB Samsung NVMe | 1TB WD(?) 5400 RPM + SSD *** | 480GB Corsair Force LENOTES:
* - Their site lists it as a Duo, but it spoofs itself under Linux to make it look like it's a quad core, rather than appearing as 2C4T, it's spoofed to 4C4T under /dev.
** - Although the RAM spec. is actually 2666MHz, the CPU only supports up to 2400MHz in its factory settings state. I may overclock to make this worthwhile, may as well. Also note that it's a single module, so I won't be able to take advantage of the dual-channel performance boost (roughly 20% based on other tests.)
*** - It comes with an HDD. I'll be throwing an SSD in later. I'll update if necessary.
**** - I don't know the exact model, but I'm pretty sure it's 4000-series, even though old reviews I've found online mention 3000-series. Then again, their reviews also mention the Nvidia 630M, so it sounds like a slightly different model, or maybe they bought the year later.
***** - Don't know the clock speed either, but it's probably somewhere around 1200-1600MHz.
The drive is probably the most useless part of this benchmarking series, since it's the easiest to swap out anyway PLUS UBM gave me a +460% for the HP NVMe.
In other words, nothing will beat it. I'm pretty sure that's what actually saved its overall score, just how fast the drive was compared to everything else.
Even if I can max out the SATA speeds in other computers, that little NVME is still going to be a good 3x faster after looking at its CrystalDiskMark grades. No exaggeration there.
I'll begin posting benchmarks tomorrow once I have some spare time, and hopefully won't be too high. I've run the tests before already just to make sure they work, and I need to fix UBM a bit first since there's some slight issues with using dual GPUs (i.e. 940M + UHD.)
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