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AMD Ryzen 5 2500U in a 15.6in laptop priced at £700.
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AMD Ryzen 5 2500U in a 15.6in laptop priced at £700.
Just out of interest, does Hexus do benchmarks with all the bloatware a-bloating or do you remove / disable it? Obviously most of the stuff isn't going to matter that much but, for example, Norton running in the background could certainly affect results.
Whenever I buy a laptop (for myself or someone else) the first thing that happens is the bloatware is removed to the extent possible (some of it is useful) so for me a benchmark without any bloat is useful. That said, how many of your average consumers go through start up options and disable stuff? And isn't the selection/implementation of software as important to assess as the hardware? It's a hard balance to strike and I wonder how Hexus do it (I can't see in the review but my brain is all mushy at the moment).
We benchmark the laptops with all of the out-the-box software intact, as this is representative of the manufacturer's design, though we do check all available updates are applied.Quote:
Originally Posted by philehidiot
The 940MX is basically the MX130 so people know it's modern equivalent. Having said that the IGP scores look a little low compared to the 940MX/MX130 from memory.
Also what driver version is this?
It appears that this is a solid outing if a little uninspired (Like Acer to be fair). Tweaks will happen, battery life is fairly poor but I'd still enjoy 6 hours away from the mains as my current laptop is like 8 years old.... not because I haven't thought about upgrading but have no real need at moment
Driver support has been very poor though. For yonks AMD didn't bother updating the mobile APU drivers. Then some tech YouTubers like TechEpiphany forced dGPU drivers and it worked fine with large performance jumps in games.I honestly hope they have updated the drivers now since the desktop versions launched!Quote:
Originally Posted by 3dcandy
All their laptop CPUs have been low end chips. Nothing in a laptop worth more than £500. I expect to see better driver support with these higher end CPUs that are easily going to outperform sales of their previous laptop CPUs, particularly those E chips, they sucked!Quote:
Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTHDriver support has been very poor though. For yonks AMD didn't bother updating the mobile APU drivers. Then some tech YouTubers like TechEpiphany forced dGPU drivers and it worked fine with large performance jumps in games.I honestly hope they have updated the drivers now since the desktop versions launched!Quote:
Originally Posted by 3dcandy
What was weird is that channel used Vega56/Vega64 drivers and forced it to work on the APU and it was fine:Quote:
Originally Posted by Wozza365
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B6FlUA9PKI
Look at the performance jump!! I assume with the desktop model it should be fine?
Edit!!
LOLWTFBBQ:
https://support.amd.com/en-us/download
You look for the mobile APUs,and there are no drivers for the Ryzen 5 2500U and Ryzen 7 2700U.
Also checked Acer:
https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/conten...oduct/7487?b=1
The latest drivers for the desktop APU are last month.Quote:
Date:
2017/12/25
Version:
9.0.000.8
Vendor:
AMD
Size:
554.6 MB
Aye updates work much better when they update themselves, think it's because they're not signed properly yet so Windows won't auto update them. The drivers supplied aren't generic last time I looked so it's a bit of a mess
I just expanded the install packages. On the AMD website the desktop APUs have a driver date of 03/02/2018 and the latest ones on the Acer website are 24/11/2017.Quote:
Originally Posted by 3dcandy
I really hope that Windows has updated the drivers to something from this year,otherwise the laptops will be having drivers a few months out of date! :O_o1:
Beating the spin 5 in cinebench and handbrake is notable - the swift 3 is going up against intel core for core and thread for thread, and still winning. That's probably the 25% higher base clocks overpowering the IPC advantage. Going by the power consumption figures, I'd also suspect that the swift 3 has cranked up the power to the 25W TDP on the AMD laptop.
This doesn't explain the poor battery life of course, unless the power management is non-existent - maybe AMD mispredicted the best codecs to include in the GPU fixed function block?
All the RR laptops tested so far have very high idle power consumption,and even desktop Ryzen upto a degree seems to have higher idle power draw.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xlucine
https://i.imgur.com/q6o4Pvl.png
https://i.imgur.com/SwgQ9qJ.png
Hardware.fr measured 12V ATX and 230V AC power consumption:
https://www.hardware.fr/articles/973...tique-cpu.html
I assume unlike desktop the 940MX switches itself off for the most part when the system is idle.
It's only got a 45w psu as well...it's not going to have a huge battery pack compared to a lot of the other laptops in that range that all have 65w psu's. I'd guess it's configured at 25w with a slightly smaller battery giving 6 hours ish real battery life. Intel do have the lead in ultimate power saving if they're configured down that way
Its weird that we haven't seen ryzen in custom laptops like clevo ones yet.
Asus made two models with desktop Ryzen CPUs.Quote:
Originally Posted by outwar6010
Considering you get a proper am4 socket on ryzen laptops it would be nice to see some clevo ones(I just love their designs).Quote:
Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH
The 48 Whr pack is the same as the spin 5, which gets 11 hours use. Wouldn't surprise me if it was the exact same pack, since they seem to share the screenQuote:
Originally Posted by 3dcandy
Aye but the Spin 5 is configured at 15w...
You could configure this at 15w but it would not be that great a jump up from the others - this is AMD's problem, although the chip is good people want everything. I'm cool with 6 hours, it's more than I'd ever need as things stand but others aren't. I guess if they went 15w it would be say 8 hours and not noticeably quicker so would still not appeal
AFAIK the laptop-specific Raven Ridge don't use AM4 (I suspect the packaging requirements are too thick for laptops) - I can't remember if they use a separate socket or if they're BGA, but I suspect the latter. That makes it unlikely that we'll see the OEM barebones laptops like Clevos, unless they decide to do "mobile desktop" versions like that ASUS.Quote:
Originally Posted by outwar6010
That said, and being fair, a Ryzen 5 2400G configured down to a 45W TDP would be a perfectly reasonable fit for a 17" desktop-replacement laptop.
Letting it suck more juice when under full load shouldn't correlate with idle consumption - it's still a laptop chip, so should aggressively gate off CPU area that isn't being used. When it's just looping a video, 25 W and 15 W chips should both be clocked down to the minimum needed to run that video - the only difference in battery life would be for demanding tasks, like gaming or looping a benchmarkQuote:
Originally Posted by 3dcandy
It's not idle consumption though is it? Why would you check for idle consumption that's a pretty useless metric. For example the Hexus test was using the laptop, so a 25w chip would use more than a 15w as it's under some load. Ryzen can be configured for a load like that, you could set it up to be a 15w chip and you'd get a better battery life but then it wouldn't perform any better than the equivalent Intel gfx in many tests so what would the point be? I couldn't care less about idle battery power as I never leave a laptop idle. Yes the Hexus test is only looping a video but it still puts the chip under load and if you clock it down to 15w it would do better but I doubt it would beat Intel as it's more powerful in many ways
I don't think TDPs work how you think TDPs work.Quote:
Originally Posted by 3dcandy
The higher TDP configuration is used to allow the CPU to run at higher boost clocks for longer periods of time. They only kick in when the chip is running at or close to 100% load. For something like playing back a video file, the chips should essentially run at idle - try monitoring CPU usage when you're watching a HD video clip some time; I'll be surprised if the CPU gets out of its base idle clock (certainly my old socket AM3 HTPC didn't).
The only reason video playback would load the CPU - making cTDP an issue - would be if the decode wasn't being hardware-accelerated properly. Normally I'd handwave that, but given AMD's recent launch drivers, it might actually be something of an issue - I'd be interested to know what the CPU load was for the different laptops during the battery life test - any chance Parm? ;) :hexlub:
I would also like to know what the date of the IGP driver too is! If the mobile APU drivers are behind that of the desktop versions,it might be that the Vega based IGP,is also sucking down more power than it needs to be. Looking at the Acer websites its months behind the desktop APUs,unless Windows downloads newer ones,which you can't get on the AMD site for the Ryzen Mobile APUs for some weird reason(can get them for mobile BR APUs though!).Quote:
Originally Posted by scaryjim
Hahaha no I get how it works but I generalised that you'd be thinking along the same lines as me with drivers and not being 100%. Also I know that Windows is currently not playing brilliantly with Ryzen throttling down all the time. I also think that setting the tdp to 25w is not going to make it throttle down like it should do... I assumed that we'd be thinking that way. I get your point..I do, but design choices like keeping the tdp at 25w against chips that are set at 15w is not really fair, and need a lot more investigation to see what's happening. I'd also assume that you think like I do and believe that if it's set to 15w then there is next to no delta in performance between the Intel and AMD options, thus rendering the AMD option pretty pointless
Unfortunately one of the downsides to laptops, compared to desktop chips, is that we tend not to have as much time with the sample. Swift 3 has already been returned to Acer, but I'll keep an eye out and check for this on the next Ryzen laptop.Quote:
Originally Posted by scaryjim
The IGP driver was dated December 2017 (Attachment 4616). Out of curiosity we did try to install the latest desktop driver but it wouldn't take. Windows Update didn't have anything newer to offer, and as you say, the AMD website hasn't caught up to Ryzen Mobile yet.Quote:
Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH
Thanks for confirming this! It seems people who bought the HP X360 are in a worse situation than Acer users,and even have older drivers for their laptop:Quote:
Originally Posted by Parm
https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebo...6490614/page/5
It does seem another case of AMD again not learning from prior launches.
Decent wee laptop. Performance - Bang-per-Buck: Knocks the rest out of the park. Pity about battery life, but it's a larger screen than most.
A bit confusing though...according to the 'Test Methodology' the rest of the pack are running Intel IGP's?? Doesn't Vega make mincemeat out of Intel IGP's?
Vega Vs the intel IGP? Yep, no contestQuote:
Originally Posted by ohmaheid
https://hexus.net/media/uploaded/201...150a8fd537.png
https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/lapto...wift-3/?page=6
A decent showing from the iris IGP in the surface pro (which needs 64MB of on-package eDRAM for that performance), but still bested by AMD
To avoid repeating themselves, the rest of the gaming tests were against a different laptop with a geforce 940MX since that's a more interesting pairing
