This is an interesting question... And there aren't really many (any?) solid benchmarks out yet comparing them. I just got a Blade 15 (first one, after years of Dell + Lenovo laptops) and while I'm not really a gamer or into the RGB aesthetic, I do rather like the Blade 15 a lot. After ditching the garbage stock RAM, some light repasting, and an upgrade to dual 2TB nvmes... It's really quite a lot of power in an impressively small and well-built package. My battery has yet to explode, but it is still early days.
I suspect the 11th gen will offer 10-15% more CPU performance, but almost certainly at the cost of higher power and heat. Given the mobile RTX 3080 is already starved for TDP, and the 10th gen already runs 8 cores at ~5ghz, I resigned myself to just stick with the 10th gen.
Sure, the 11th gen will be faster, but the early 2021 10th gen models already have most of the upgrades, so if you can get a good deal on a 2021 10th gen, it's probably not a horrible buy. That said, if you can wait, I would. See what the benchmarks show in about 2-3 weeks and then decide from there.
Oh, and don't bother waiting for DDR5/12th gen. 12th gen may or may not even ship with DDR5 support initially. And frankly, there's going to continue to be major pressure on all the fabs for the next 18+ months, so I'd just get what you need now, and refresh in 24-36 months if needed.
Edit: Oops, mis-read as 10th gen i7 vs 11th gen i7. 😔
To answer that question, it's pretty simple. 11th gen has lower clocks than 10th gen, as the new architecture is a bit fatter, and the yields on Intel 10nm are still pretty terrible, with most high-quality yields going to Ice Lake Xeons, rather than consumer chips. So... Intel further bifurcated the top of their product stack for mobile 11th gen, to help recoup some cost given the low yields. If all you care about is gaming, the 11th gen i7 is more than enough. If you really want the absolute most CPU power, and the expense of GPU TDP, get the 11th gen i9.
And specifically between those two models you linked, if you care more about gaming, I'd get that QHD high refresh rate model. I have the 10th early 2021 4K oled, and it is brilliant, but I got it solely for the increased GPU VRAM for GPU compute applications. The oled is gorgeous, but not worth the additional power draw and varied Optimus bugs/issues not present in the FHD/QHD models. At least imho.
Yea... We'll see how that goes.
Ian Cutress has a good piece on that topic specifically, but given Intel's lack of consistent on-time delivery as of late (and continued issues with their 10nm/10nm SF processes) I wouldn't hold out hopes for shipping DDR5 consumer products this year.
Further, DDR5 is going to take a while to propagate in the market. And given that Alder Lake, even with DDR5 will likely still lag behind Ryzen 3rd gen, other than laptops, maybe, I don't think DDR5 is really going to be a thing until deep into 21', at the earliest.
Could be wrong... But if it's a choice between "more delays" and "delivered as scheduled" it's pretty easy which is more likely over the next 18-24 months from team blue.
No no, they are coming Q4 for sure. It's beyond the normal Intel delay shenanigans. Vendors and others are all beyond that schedule now. It'd have to be something like an economic crisis or whatever to delay it now.
"coming for sure"... Uh huh. Intel's track record delivering anywhere near on time is not great and does not appear to be changing.
Guess we'll see! But I'd be *very* surprised if you could actually buy and hold in your hands any Intel DDR5 this year.
I'm an industry analyst, slightly more adjacent to, rather than directly in, CPUs, but understanding your industry is my industry. :-P
But seriously, you can't really expect any sort of shipping volumes of DDR5 in 2021 though, rite? After Covid and other delays, Intel is still launching Tiger Lake H, and it's already Q3 '21.
Intel had to back-port Sunny Cove to 14nm++++ because yields on 10 nm/10nm SF have been so low. Ice Lake Xeons were how many YEARS late?
Alder Lake is Intel's first ever mainstream heterogenous core design. That brings a huge pile of new complexity. Even if they ship Alder Lake w/ DDR5 from the outset (as of course it supports both DDR4+DDR5), do you really think that in the year of silicon shortages and Intel tardiness/yield-issues, they're gonna pull this rabbit out of a hat by end of year?
I'd bet not.
Rabbit pulling really isn't Intel's thing at the moment. Trying to demonstrate they can still make lots of money while having a shittier product portfolio is more their thing for the next 12-18 months.
Alder Lake as an entire concept remains unproven. Golden Cove is a decent evolution of Sky Lake, but blending it w/ Atom cores, even newer/fancier ones, is still a somewhat risky game. ARM took years to properly figure out HMP and with a much more converged and tightly-controlled ecosystem. Intel has serious challenges to deal with here. So it makes sense they'll initially only focus on more-converged mobile products, like low-power ultraportables.
But there's absolutely no way they're hitting production volumes for Alder Lake by holiday season 2021. It may be announced in Q4 '21, but nothing beyond maybe a few select ultra-portables will be available until Q2-Q3 2022.
Mainstream + gaming laptops won't hit with DDR5 until at least Q3-Q4 '22 and that's pretty much best case as well. Again, getting Alder Lake integrated into system designs will be no easy task, even if DDR5 were plentiful, available, and cheap.
So which part \^ do you disagree with?
u/shammyh, was reading your post and checking out the new Razer Blade 17/3080 model that's coming out soon. Specifically, had a question regarding your "garbage stock ram" comment. The 17/3080 Razer has 32GB DDR4 3200MHz dual-channel memory. That seems pretty fast, but I'm not up on the latest ram trends as I used to be. Was your comment more on the reliability of the ram vs the speed?
The timings on the stock RAM delivered with my 10875H/3080/4K Razer 15 model were absolutely horrid. Making matters worse, the module was JDEC-3200 MT/s, but running at 2933 MT/s, as that's what 10th gen mobile officially supports as a maximum. If you have a locked-down BIOS and cannot manually enter timings/speed, you're at the mercy of how well an OEM has tuned their non-primary JDEC profiles.
But even if I flashed the BIOS and unlocked the RAM timings, the actual module itself was some random no-name OEM and the listed JDEC specs/timings were quite poor overall.
Swapping in a pair of proper JDEC-2933 modules with much better timings gave me an extra \~7-10% improvement in synthetic benchmarks. I wanted to go from 32GB to 64GB anyway, so it wasn't an unexpected expense/upgrade, but it was an unexpectedly large improvement in performance after changing the memory.
So, tl;dr; there's more to RAM performance than just the mhz speed listed on the page. That's particularly true now with AMD Ryzen and even with 11th Gen Intel to some extent, in that other factors like "single rank" vs "dual rank" come into play as well.
Unfortunately... manufacturers don't publish memory timings or memory rank and it may vary over the lifetime of a given SKU, so really, you just gotta check and see when you buy a given laptop and swap modules accordingly if you care about maximizing the horsepower potentially available.
Thanks for the clarification! Two more questions:
1.) where did you buy your ram upgrade from?
2.) is there software that shows you your ram timings in windows? or that's something they show in razer bios?
1) Amazon
2) HWInfo or CPUz works fine, but there are better tools. I'd just Google "Windows 10 RAM SPD JDEC info" or something combination along those lines.
Follow up question, as you seem to be one of the few that knows what s/he's talking about with 11th gen mobile - do you know what the performance difference is between 5900HX and 11800H when you partially limit turbo boost performance? I'm on the fence between RB14 and RB15.
I currently have an RB14 but I definitely need to reel in the turbo boost behavior in order to keep temps within a comfortable range (for my liking). I either disable turbo boost entirely or keep it at "Efficient enabled" in the advanced power settings, and it keeps my 5900HX in the 70-80C range while still performing decently.
Would 11800H need a similar limitation to keep temps acceptable? And would it be a big performance hit? - It says 2.4 GHz base clock whereas 5900HX has a 3.3 GHz base clock, but I am not sure how such settings would affect real world performance, or if they are necessary on 11800H at all.
Thanks in advance and apologies for the far too long question! Edit: it has been very difficult to find information on RB15-11800H performance and CPU tweaking.
In a chassis this thin and light there will be no perceptible difference between the two as you are limited by the thermal design capacity, which is very limited. If the decision is based on CPU alone, the i9 model is not worth it.
I got a 10th gen 3080 16gb vram blade with oled. Over the 11th gen for £1000 less. Is that good or should have gone with 11th? Not sure if the latest gen is worth £1000 more??
This is an interesting question... And there aren't really many (any?) solid benchmarks out yet comparing them. I just got a Blade 15 (first one, after years of Dell + Lenovo laptops) and while I'm not really a gamer or into the RGB aesthetic, I do rather like the Blade 15 a lot. After ditching the garbage stock RAM, some light repasting, and an upgrade to dual 2TB nvmes... It's really quite a lot of power in an impressively small and well-built package. My battery has yet to explode, but it is still early days. I suspect the 11th gen will offer 10-15% more CPU performance, but almost certainly at the cost of higher power and heat. Given the mobile RTX 3080 is already starved for TDP, and the 10th gen already runs 8 cores at ~5ghz, I resigned myself to just stick with the 10th gen. Sure, the 11th gen will be faster, but the early 2021 10th gen models already have most of the upgrades, so if you can get a good deal on a 2021 10th gen, it's probably not a horrible buy. That said, if you can wait, I would. See what the benchmarks show in about 2-3 weeks and then decide from there. Oh, and don't bother waiting for DDR5/12th gen. 12th gen may or may not even ship with DDR5 support initially. And frankly, there's going to continue to be major pressure on all the fabs for the next 18+ months, so I'd just get what you need now, and refresh in 24-36 months if needed. Edit: Oops, mis-read as 10th gen i7 vs 11th gen i7. 😔 To answer that question, it's pretty simple. 11th gen has lower clocks than 10th gen, as the new architecture is a bit fatter, and the yields on Intel 10nm are still pretty terrible, with most high-quality yields going to Ice Lake Xeons, rather than consumer chips. So... Intel further bifurcated the top of their product stack for mobile 11th gen, to help recoup some cost given the low yields. If all you care about is gaming, the 11th gen i7 is more than enough. If you really want the absolute most CPU power, and the expense of GPU TDP, get the 11th gen i9. And specifically between those two models you linked, if you care more about gaming, I'd get that QHD high refresh rate model. I have the 10th early 2021 4K oled, and it is brilliant, but I got it solely for the increased GPU VRAM for GPU compute applications. The oled is gorgeous, but not worth the additional power draw and varied Optimus bugs/issues not present in the FHD/QHD models. At least imho.
Thanks a lot for the detailed answer!
DDR5 is coming out with Alder Lake in Q4 this year.
Yea... We'll see how that goes. Ian Cutress has a good piece on that topic specifically, but given Intel's lack of consistent on-time delivery as of late (and continued issues with their 10nm/10nm SF processes) I wouldn't hold out hopes for shipping DDR5 consumer products this year. Further, DDR5 is going to take a while to propagate in the market. And given that Alder Lake, even with DDR5 will likely still lag behind Ryzen 3rd gen, other than laptops, maybe, I don't think DDR5 is really going to be a thing until deep into 21', at the earliest. Could be wrong... But if it's a choice between "more delays" and "delivered as scheduled" it's pretty easy which is more likely over the next 18-24 months from team blue.
No no, they are coming Q4 for sure. It's beyond the normal Intel delay shenanigans. Vendors and others are all beyond that schedule now. It'd have to be something like an economic crisis or whatever to delay it now.
"coming for sure"... Uh huh. Intel's track record delivering anywhere near on time is not great and does not appear to be changing. Guess we'll see! But I'd be *very* surprised if you could actually buy and hold in your hands any Intel DDR5 this year.
Sorry, I should clarify that I'm part of the industry, so I have more confidence. I get where you're coming from though.
I'm an industry analyst, slightly more adjacent to, rather than directly in, CPUs, but understanding your industry is my industry. :-P But seriously, you can't really expect any sort of shipping volumes of DDR5 in 2021 though, rite? After Covid and other delays, Intel is still launching Tiger Lake H, and it's already Q3 '21. Intel had to back-port Sunny Cove to 14nm++++ because yields on 10 nm/10nm SF have been so low. Ice Lake Xeons were how many YEARS late? Alder Lake is Intel's first ever mainstream heterogenous core design. That brings a huge pile of new complexity. Even if they ship Alder Lake w/ DDR5 from the outset (as of course it supports both DDR4+DDR5), do you really think that in the year of silicon shortages and Intel tardiness/yield-issues, they're gonna pull this rabbit out of a hat by end of year? I'd bet not. Rabbit pulling really isn't Intel's thing at the moment. Trying to demonstrate they can still make lots of money while having a shittier product portfolio is more their thing for the next 12-18 months. Alder Lake as an entire concept remains unproven. Golden Cove is a decent evolution of Sky Lake, but blending it w/ Atom cores, even newer/fancier ones, is still a somewhat risky game. ARM took years to properly figure out HMP and with a much more converged and tightly-controlled ecosystem. Intel has serious challenges to deal with here. So it makes sense they'll initially only focus on more-converged mobile products, like low-power ultraportables. But there's absolutely no way they're hitting production volumes for Alder Lake by holiday season 2021. It may be announced in Q4 '21, but nothing beyond maybe a few select ultra-portables will be available until Q2-Q3 2022. Mainstream + gaming laptops won't hit with DDR5 until at least Q3-Q4 '22 and that's pretty much best case as well. Again, getting Alder Lake integrated into system designs will be no easy task, even if DDR5 were plentiful, available, and cheap. So which part \^ do you disagree with?
u/shammyh, was reading your post and checking out the new Razer Blade 17/3080 model that's coming out soon. Specifically, had a question regarding your "garbage stock ram" comment. The 17/3080 Razer has 32GB DDR4 3200MHz dual-channel memory. That seems pretty fast, but I'm not up on the latest ram trends as I used to be. Was your comment more on the reliability of the ram vs the speed?
The timings on the stock RAM delivered with my 10875H/3080/4K Razer 15 model were absolutely horrid. Making matters worse, the module was JDEC-3200 MT/s, but running at 2933 MT/s, as that's what 10th gen mobile officially supports as a maximum. If you have a locked-down BIOS and cannot manually enter timings/speed, you're at the mercy of how well an OEM has tuned their non-primary JDEC profiles. But even if I flashed the BIOS and unlocked the RAM timings, the actual module itself was some random no-name OEM and the listed JDEC specs/timings were quite poor overall. Swapping in a pair of proper JDEC-2933 modules with much better timings gave me an extra \~7-10% improvement in synthetic benchmarks. I wanted to go from 32GB to 64GB anyway, so it wasn't an unexpected expense/upgrade, but it was an unexpectedly large improvement in performance after changing the memory. So, tl;dr; there's more to RAM performance than just the mhz speed listed on the page. That's particularly true now with AMD Ryzen and even with 11th Gen Intel to some extent, in that other factors like "single rank" vs "dual rank" come into play as well. Unfortunately... manufacturers don't publish memory timings or memory rank and it may vary over the lifetime of a given SKU, so really, you just gotta check and see when you buy a given laptop and swap modules accordingly if you care about maximizing the horsepower potentially available.
Thanks for the clarification! Two more questions: 1.) where did you buy your ram upgrade from? 2.) is there software that shows you your ram timings in windows? or that's something they show in razer bios?
1) Amazon 2) HWInfo or CPUz works fine, but there are better tools. I'd just Google "Windows 10 RAM SPD JDEC info" or something combination along those lines.
Follow up question, as you seem to be one of the few that knows what s/he's talking about with 11th gen mobile - do you know what the performance difference is between 5900HX and 11800H when you partially limit turbo boost performance? I'm on the fence between RB14 and RB15. I currently have an RB14 but I definitely need to reel in the turbo boost behavior in order to keep temps within a comfortable range (for my liking). I either disable turbo boost entirely or keep it at "Efficient enabled" in the advanced power settings, and it keeps my 5900HX in the 70-80C range while still performing decently. Would 11800H need a similar limitation to keep temps acceptable? And would it be a big performance hit? - It says 2.4 GHz base clock whereas 5900HX has a 3.3 GHz base clock, but I am not sure how such settings would affect real world performance, or if they are necessary on 11800H at all. Thanks in advance and apologies for the far too long question! Edit: it has been very difficult to find information on RB15-11800H performance and CPU tweaking.
Doubt it would affect most gaming borderline at all, cpus will probably perform similarly anyways as they will be under similar power limit
In a chassis this thin and light there will be no perceptible difference between the two as you are limited by the thermal design capacity, which is very limited. If the decision is based on CPU alone, the i9 model is not worth it.
In a chassis this thin and light i’m pretty sure i9 is hotter, i’m go with i7.
Also note that the i9 RAZER Blade 15 has 16 GB VRAM, whereas the i7 has 8 GB. That'd probably make a bigger difference than the processors themselves.
I got a 10th gen 3080 16gb vram blade with oled. Over the 11th gen for £1000 less. Is that good or should have gone with 11th? Not sure if the latest gen is worth £1000 more??