This is just a review of my new laptop. (UPDATE - The Handbrake results have been posted)
Laptop features
Display: The built-in 1440p display looks pretty nice. If there is backlight bleed, I haven't noticed it. I don't have good enough eyes to know if the color accuracy and stuff is good. The display itself looks pretty sharp. I expected that I would have trouble reading such a high definition screen that is so small, but thus far I haven't needed to up the DPI scaling or anything; it has been usable as is. That said, I would have preferred a 1080p panel. The only major gripe I have is that I don't particularly care for center hinges. This one is only just barely strong enough to hold the display now, in five years I have doubts about whether there will be enough friction to hold the lid from falling over if the thing is touched. Historically center hinges have not held up well. Time will tell. I don't tend to open my laptop from the corner, so I am hoping it won't get torqued over time. My older laptops (ye old ancient Dell Latitudes) had actual latches in the middle, so I tend to open up laptops from the middle.
Keyboard: I personally don't like chiclet keyboards. That said, there is decent throw to them (a little more than your average laptop), and there is at least a little feedback, which is nice. They put the Ctrl and the Fn keys in the correct order (my Lenovo drives me nuts that the Fn key is the bottom left, not the Ctrl). There is a numpad, but they cut off the rightmost column of it (the -, +, and Enter keys). They have a minus and a plus above the / and *, but that makes the numpad feel unnatural. And I don't understand why; there was plenty of real-estate to make the keyboard a key width wider. But instead they turned what could have been a really nice (for a chiclet) keyboard into something that is kinda meh.
Touchpad: My what a monster. It is bigger than my hand. If anything, I would say that this touchpad is too big. Includes multi-touch and stuff like that. I kinda wish there were physical buttons, and there is plenty of touchpad that I would have felt ok sacrificing some of it for them. The touchpad is so big that I sometimes have trouble finding the right side to do a right click. It has corner buttons to disable parts of the trackpad, so you can easily disable them if you are using a mouse (so you don't get errant clicks from your arm or palm sitting on it). You can disable the right half, or the entire thing. I think that is backwards and it should have been left half or the entire thing. If you are gaming with a mouse, you typically are still using wasd to move around, which means your left hand is still on the keyboard, meaning the left half would be better to disable. It is still the nicest touchpad I have ever used though.
Power/Battery: the 240W brick is a big boy, but not as big as you might think (I had a picture of it in the previous post). It would be nice if it had an LED on it indicating it was powered. It may not seem like a big deal at first, but their decision to pick a brick with a right angle connector on it is stupid and blatantly wrong when the power port is on the back. Right angles are nice for laptops who have all their ports on the sides; on the back though it is either putting the cable in front of an exhaust port (bad for a performance machine that is likely thermally limited), in front of IO ports (good luck getting that Thunderbolt cable plugged in with it the other way). Or it is pointing up and if you open the screen too far it pushes the power cord out (already happened twice). The battery itself is small (66Wh) which combined with the hardware inside results in a poor battery life, though not as bad as I expected. Windows claimed when I was downloading stuff it would get 3-4 hours (three hours until I dimmed the screen a bit), which is actually more than I expected. While gaming that battery won't last a half hour (the GPU alone slurps 140W, more than twice my entire Lenovo) but while gaming I just need it to act as a UPS.
Misc: It is refreshing that the laptop didn't come with any bloatware on it at all; just a single manufacturer app to tune fan settings and the like. No antivirus BS and trials and stuff. The app was a simple, not flashy design that is more function than form, which is refreshing. That design extends to the chassis as well; there is no branding on the laptop, not a lot of flashy RGB crap (which I don't like), just a sticker you can put on if you want it for the lid. The casing feels fine, and I don't feel like it is going to break if I hold it by the corner. When I was benchmarking it got up to 75C, the fan profile tuning needs some adjustments, but that was as hot as it got. Benchmarks don't take long, but I didn't feel the heat permeating through the keyboard or touchpad, though I am not sure I ran it hard enough long enough to do that. Just browsing the internet the fans are real quiet, and it doesn't get terribly hot.
Performance Comparison to Tower:
Real World: this perhaps isn't fair, but both sides have disadvantages. The laptop is Win10, which is slower than Win7 by quite a bit. My tower's Win7 install has 9 years of cruft in it though, so it might be a bit more fair than it seems on its face. Both are snappy, though perhaps the laptop feels a little bit more snappy, and is perhaps mildly more responsive. I assume this is Win10 trying to scan it or something, but when I was installing stuff, the installs were much much faster to open and run on my tower, despite the disk advantage in the laptop. In this regard, while the laptop is a minor upgrade, the desktop is still really good and has held up well in the past decade. My disdain of Win10 is the main reason I would consider this a push.
Benchmarks
Handbrake
The test video was a 19GB 1080p blu-ray rip using the same settings on both (the settings I would use to compress a video for my library). The encode took under 2 hours (1:50), which is better than the tower. I don't have exact numbers for the tower since the latest handbrake doesn't run on Win7, but historically the tower took around real-time (meaning a 3 hour movie took 3 hours to encode). The old desktop would take
This is a CPU-centric real world test, and the laptop was an estimated 20-25% faster, which was far less than what I expected. Intel hasn't made major strides with their strides with their CPUs in several generations, but even just minor improvements I would have expected more from a 9 generation jump.
It is worth noting though that Handbrake on Windows 7 was able to use all my cores at maximum speed, but the laptop rarely had all the cores of the CPU at maximum clock and floored. This is an odd thing that someone more familiar with the tool would have to answer. It definitely should not have been IO bound with an NVME (see the following benchmark) and the RAM is much faster, so I am not sure why it wasn't able to floor the CPU.
CrystalDiskMark
In what should surprise no-one, a modern PCIe4 NVME drive is almost an order of magnitude faster than my 840 Pro which got curb-stomped while its lunch money was being stolen. Matt said those speeds were decent for a Gen4 NVME drive, but not top of the line. Regardless it is a massive upgrade and I am not disappointed. It is a latency upgrade too, though I don't have a good way to benchmark that.
Furmark
A pure GPU benchmark, the laptop is just under 50% faster. While that is a sizable increase, it is far less than I expected. Given online benchmarks, I expected the laptop to be double the score of the tower. Furmark has a reputation for pushing video card's power systems to their limits though, and the laptop has more of a power wall than my old desktop where the AMD Radeon R9 390x sucked down so much power it tripped the overload alarm on my UPS when running.
89fps, 5356 score on the tower vs 130fps, 7806 score on the new laptop
Unigine Benchmarks
There are three benchmarks in this suite: Valley, Heaven and Superposition. The laptop is 100% faster. While that is sizable, it is about what I expected. Also of note is that my laptop came in around 10% slower than Matt's mid-range PC (Running a Ryzen 5600x and 3060ti), which is almost exactly what I would have built had I gone with a new tower instead.
Valley: 67.8fps, 2838 score on the tower vs 134.6fps, 5632 score on the new laptop
Heaven: 68.5fps, 1726 score on the tower vs 158.2fps, 3984 score on the new laptop
Superposition: would not run on the tower vs 47.5 fps, 6347 score on the new laptop vs 51.6fps, 6895 score on Matt's machine.
Conclusion
It isn't unexpected that the laptop is faster; there is 9 years of CPU and RAM difference, and around 5 years of GPU different between the two systems. The main reason for upgrading though wasn't performance; it was modern technology support (things like USB3, which my tower only kinda supports, NVME, newer PCIe, etc). My tower was due for an upgrade. Despite the obvious speed advantage, you can really see the difference in the disk speed and the Unigine benchmarks. While I could have upgraded my current tower (put a more modern video card, NVME secondary drive, and a new USB controller) in the desktop and eeked another couple of years out of it, the timing was right.
There were other considerations to the upgrade as well because simply put: the performance of the tower was still adequate for its usage despite being obviously slower. It still played games at the LAN just fine, I still ran everything at max or near-max settings. Its boot times and load times were okay. The fact that it still ran Win7 was a bonus to me. The performance of my tower, while it looks really bad in the data above, is still decent for modern usage.
This brings me to the primary reason that I upgraded it: as I have begun traveling more, I will want to be able to bring more of my stuff (and life) on the road with me. This laptop will enable me to have more than just a portable web browser when I am traveling, I will have access to everything (except for the network storage I have which wouldn't go with me). On the last trip to SD, I just copied a large chunk of my media onto a couple of flash drives and that was adequate to fulfill any entertainment and media needs I had while on the road. I could easily install a second drive into the laptop and use that instead. The performance of laptops has gotten far enough that I expect this laptop will be adequate for years to come. One could easily argue that my current laptop sufficed for the last trip and they aren't wrong, but this opens doors that laptop couldn't and it means I won't have multiple things to maintain, it is just unplug the dock and my whole computer is with me. I won't have to spend three days transferring data around before going anywhere. The takedown on a laptop is just yanking a plug once I get a dock for it. I only used to need to do that once a year for the LAN. Now I can do it when I go on the road. It still has adequate battery life for when I am using it as just a portable browser. I almost never sit at my computer for more than three hours at a clip when I am not at home (where it will be plugged in).
Overall, I am quite happy with the purchase, even if it was an expensive one, and with a looming vehicular and house purchase some might think now was not quite the best time which is a very reasonable position. Still, despite the current chip shortages and the like, I didn't get pillaged on it. I think going with a laptop was worth the roughly 10% hit on performance and 25% on cost (The laptop was 2300, and the ITX tower build came in at 1800 or so, most of which was video card). Personally, I am not sure how many more years my tower would have been viable even with upgrades (which would have cost 4 figures if I replaced the video card), and waiting until after the dust settled on the house would have pushed the timetables out another 3 years, maybe 4 (I assume after I buy the house the first year will be getting furniture and stuff for it). Add in the immediate benefits a laptop has to my increased traveling the next few years, and I felt like while this was not an ideal time, it was the best in the foreseeable future.
