• 3 hours ago
Transcript
00:00Hey, how's it going? Dave2D here. So traditionally, when it comes to buying gaming laptops, the
00:08CPU is a pretty easy decision. I mean, there's just not that many choices to choose from.
00:12So last year, it was the i7-7700HQ, and if you couldn't afford that, you'd get the i5.
00:18And the year before that, it was the 6700HQ. And it's just always been really few options,
00:23which was kind of a good thing, because it just made the process a lot easier. But right
00:27now, in 2018, for whatever reason, there's so many good CPU options for gaming laptops.
00:33We already have the 8th Gen U processors, the Kaby Lake R's, and those are quad-core
00:3815W packages. And if you pair that up with an MX150, which a lot of laptops do, you actually
00:42get a pretty respectable gaming laptop. It's not like a hardcore gaming laptop, but you
00:46can play a lot of games with really respectable frame rates. And as long as the laptop is
00:50cooled properly, which not every company does, but if it is, you're good to go for light
00:54to moderate gaming. Now, the H processors coming out are more exciting. The i9 is going
00:59to be nutty, but the two more common ones are these two, the i7 and the i5. That i7
01:06looks ripe. 6 cores, strong turbo, and it's in the same 45W package as the previous generation,
01:11so you don't have to have any kind of crazy thermal solution. And we've seen some preliminary
01:14benchmarks pop up, and it really does look promising. Compared to the current i7-7700HQ,
01:20it's like 30-35% better for multi-core benchmarks. Now, in the past, a lot of developers haven't
01:25put in the time to optimize their games for just more than 4 CPU cores, but because of
01:29Ryzen last year, and just the state of the industry now where core count is kind of creeping
01:33up slowly, I think companies will put in the time. So, there's another batch of CPUs made
01:38by Intel, the Kaby Lake-G, and there's 5 of them. These are kind of a collab between Intel
01:43and AMD, so they're running Intel CPUs with an AMD Vega GPU. There's two different GPUs,
01:49the Vega MGL and the Vega MGH, GH being the stronger, more powerful one of the two. The
01:55performance is good, like really good for the wattage, and I think that's its biggest
01:58advantage. Efficiency. It's energy efficient, it's space efficient, because they're packing
02:03the CPU, the GPU, and the VRAM all onto one chip. It's still not an APU, it's a CPU and
02:08a dedicated GPU, but it's just packaged into one thing, so you can build something that's
02:12smaller, thinner, and lighter than a laptop that uses a discrete GPU from Nvidia. Now,
02:17the preliminary benchmarks have been pretty interesting. We're looking at something between
02:20a 1050 and a 1050 Ti for the GL, and then for the GH, the better one, the performance
02:26is going to be something around a GTX 1060. And they'll both be quite energy efficient,
02:30but the big disadvantage I see with these is pricing. The GH model in particular is
02:34going to start at like $1,200, maybe even more, and you're getting, remember, GTX 1060
02:39performance for $1,200. And I feel like at that price point, you can get something that's
02:43like a 1070 from Nvidia. It's going to be thicker, it's going to be louder, it's going
02:47to be bigger, but you're going to get better performance for your money. The last ones
02:52are the AMD chips. So they have 8-core and 6-core Ryzen laptops that are using these
02:56desktop CPUs, which are really powerful, but, I mean, they're desktop CPUs, so that doesn't
03:01really count in this conversation. They're also just stupidly expensive. The ones that
03:05are most interesting to me are their new Ryzen Mobile APUs, and their integrated GPUs on
03:10these things are so much better than the integrated Intel GPUs, like the HD630 or even
03:15the UHD630. It's just miles ahead of the Intel integrated GPUs. It benchmarks well, but the
03:21games are just so poorly optimized with these drivers that it just looks like a crappy card.
03:26If they can fix those drivers, and they will, but if they can fix it quickly enough, it'll
03:29be a strong competitor for casual gaming. And if you see what devices they're putting
03:32these into, like we're talking Ultrabooks and just really thin devices, it's pretty
03:36cool. You can bring something like this to school, to work, and just kind of kick it
03:40for some light gaming at home. So, this video's been filled with tons of, like, nerd numbers
03:45and stuff like that. I'm just going to break it down really simple. Right now, if you're
03:47looking for a CPU for a gaming laptop, there's obviously a lot of choices to choose from.
03:52It's obviously harder this year to choose one than last year. If you want something
03:56that's like the best of the best and you have the money, then the i7 and the i9 that's popping
04:00out from Intel soon will be a good bet. But if you have something like a smaller budget
04:05and you're just looking for a thinner device that gets decent gaming performance, take
04:08a look at the Kaby Lake G from Intel. So, these are the Intel CPUs comboed with the
04:12AMD Vega GPUs. It's good performance, and you should comfortably break 60 frames per
04:17second for most games. And if you don't care too much about image quality or resolution,
04:21you can drop down to a U processor paired up with the NVIDIA MX150. But if you want
04:25something that's like really budget and you're looking for something that's like thin and
04:29light that doesn't cost too much, those upcoming Ryzen mobile APUs should be pretty good. Some
04:33of them are already out, it's just that the drivers aren't great, and if you just give
04:37it some time for them to flesh out, I think they can be great for just the casual gamer
04:41with a smaller budget. Okay, hope you guys enjoyed this video, hope it clarified some
04:44things. Thumbs if you liked it, subs if you loved it. See you guys next time.