Just two processor generations in the past, standard recommendation about laptop shopping nonetheless held up. You may fairly recommend folks lower your expenses by shopping for one gen again. A efficiency distinction existed, however by no means so enormous that you just’d stress about being penny-wise however pound-foolish.
Intel’s 12th-generation Alder Lake CPUs upended that line of pondering, nonetheless—and Team Blue’s launch of its shiny new flagship laptop computer processor, the Core i9-13980HX, solely reinforces the brand new world order. With 24 cores, 32 threads, and a max turbo pace of 5.6GHz, it’s an absolute monster of a chip. Like its desktop counterparts, it’s able to unbelievable efficiency. You may purchase an Alder Lake pocket book, however you’d be foregoing the present greatest chip for heavy workloads whereas on the go.
You can catch the nitty-gritty deep dive into the benchmark leads to our YouTube video, however for the main takeaways about Intel’s new top-end cellular half, examined on a monstrous MSI Titan GT77 with the Core i9-13980HX and an Nvidia RTX 4090, learn on.
Multithreaded work will get an enormous increase
The quicker you’ll be able to rip via renders, encodes, and different heavy workloads, the quicker you’ll be able to transfer on to your subsequent process. And the Core i9-13980HX chews via its queue like no different cellular chip proper now.
Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
Raptor Lake’s positive factors over Alder Lake in laptops run virtually parallel to those on desktops, with comparable heavy efficiency positive factors. No civilized wins right here; 13th-gen’s lead over 12th-gen is substantial. In our Cinebench R23, Blender, and V-Ray rendering checks, we noticed between a 32 and 40 p.c enchancment, with the best bounce in Cinebench R23’s multithreaded take a look at.
The story’s comparable (although not as dramatic) in Handbrake, the place we feed a big 4K mov file into this system and crunch it down right into a extra compact H.265 file. With the Core i9-13980HK, the encode finishes about 25 p.c quicker.
Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
The efficiency boosts apply pretty evenly as you scale up in thread depend use, too, as illustrated by this take a look at of thread scaling efficiency in Cinebench R23. Lightly threaded work sees decrease double-digit will increase, which rework into far better jumps as you enter closely threaded territory.
The solely lingering query concerning the 13980HK is the way it’ll fare in opposition to the looming specter of the Ryzen 9 7945HX: AMD’s greatest on cellular is ready to launch quickly as nicely, and it too needs to be a bruising chip. Expect some drama within the coming showdown between the 2 flagship cellular elements.
Not all manufacturing work advantages, although
When we turned an eye fixed to different kinds of content material creation duties—particularly these achieved in Adobe’s Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Lightroom functions—our expertise with the 13980HX veered off into puzzling territory.
On desktop, our benchmark outcomes confirmed Raptor Lake with a transparent lead over Alder Lake, with modest however tangible positive factors starting from 8 to 17 p.c. But on the time of our testing, this new 13th-gen laptop computer half’s take a look at outcomes technically got here in underneath that of the 12900HX.
Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
If we had been to take this at face worth, the cheap characterization of those outcomes is that they fall inside margin of error—that’s, you get the identical efficiency in Adobe apps on 13th-gen as 12th-gen. But that’s nonetheless an odd consequence.
Complicating issues is that our checks simulated common use, in that the GPU was lively as nicely. You may say that these benchmarks don’t present a transparent, remoted image of the 13980HX’s efficiency in comparison with the 12900HX, and that wouldn’t be improper to say. However in the true world, most individuals don’t lean solely on the CPU, and these outcomes presumably spotlight a attainable state of affairs {that a} content material creator may run into throughout these early days.
Did we make a mistake in our testing? Is there a driver problem? Or is the software program simply not but optimized? The reply is unclear, and we’ll must do some follow-up investigation.
Games get an uplift too
Unlike desktops, getting a precise learn on the laptop computer CPU efficiency in video games is a little bit difficult. You’ll not often discover two notebooks with completely different technology processors however the identical GPU—a lot much less from the identical maker and product line.
Such was the case with the laptops we had for benchmarking. They had been comparable, however not the identical. One was a last-generation MSI Titan GT77 laptop computer with a 12th-gen Core i9-12900HX and an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti. The different? A current MSI Titan GT77 with the Core i9-13980HX and an Nvidia RTX 4090.
Given these apples-to-oranges configurations, our gaming benchmarks largely replicate the efficiency positive factors of the Nvidia RTX 4090 over the RTX 3080 Ti. Yet we did have one title amongst our benchmark checks that supplied a clue concerning the 13980HX’s affect on CPU-bound video games: Counter-Strike Global Offensive.
Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
While you’ll be able to’t financial institution on CSGO’s 23 p.c in all conditions with a CPU-bound sport, this take a look at end result a minimum of gives some thought of the 13980HX’s affect on gaming efficiency—a helpful tidbit for people that care about such particulars, particularly when choosing a laptop computer configuration.
Don’t purchase this chip for on a regular basis duties
If you comply with processor information and launches frequently, you most likely already know {that a} CPU just like the 13980HX is overkill for packages like Microsoft Office apps and internet looking. Ridiculous overkill, really, for the overwhelming majority of individuals.
Longer bars point out higher efficiency. Right-click on desktop (or long-press on cellular) to view picture full-size in one other window.
Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
Yes, workplace energy customers do exist—like people who crunch intense spreadsheets. And usually, extra cores equal extra energy for them. But that’s not the workload mirrored within the type of Office benchmarks we’re at present in a position to run. (Our particular Excel eSports benchmark created for us by competitor Jason Moore is sadly nonetheless damaged.) Procyon zeros in on extra typical productiveness work, and whereas the Core i9-13980HX outperforms its predecessor, a 14 p.c total enchancment isn’t actual justification for a CPU with a really helpful value of $668. (You’d by no means pay for a laptop computer chip independently after all, however that determine provides an thought of its relative worth.)
Gordon Mah Ung / PCWorld
The identical story goes for internet looking. Yep, there’s an enchancment. But once more, you’re not shopping for this chip for a 25 p.c enchancment in internet app efficiency. It’s a bonus, not a function. We suggest purchasing accordingly.
Expect to see extra 13th-gen laptops hitting the streets very quickly. Stay tuned to PCWorld’s roundup of the best laptops for a sensible information to the highest present choices obtainable.