Laptop choice: Ryzen 7 v. i9 v. Ultra 5

I’m driving myself crazy with various benchmarking results – help!

Looking for a new laptop. Currently have an Asus 14″ Zenbook i5-8th gen on Win 11 and it’s finally showing its age a bit. Laptop travels round with me a fair bit as I don’t enjoy using phone screens. The most intensive things it gets used for is some (quite old) games that run “ok” with limited framerate/resolution on my current laptop, and occasionally putting together a holiday edit off some GoPro 10 footage. Other than that it’s STW and a bit of GoldenCheatah!

I’m intending to upgrade the GoPro to an insta360 in near future and maybe get more adventurous with my game choice.

I have had zero issues with my 14″ Zenbook so keen for another one, plus it helps narrow the choice, to hopefully 3 options:

£750~ Core i9-13900H + Iris Xe + 16GB + 1TB SSD
£650~ Ryzen 7 – 8840HS + Radeon 780M + 16GB RAM + 1TB SSD
£550~ Core Ultra 5 125H + Arc +  16GB + 512GB SSD

My gut feel is the middle option. Anything I should consider?

Laptops are tricky to spec as you can’t just upgrade the screen or the graphics capabilities very easily, if at all.

If you want better game performance, a good quality screen and something with a dedicated GPU are basically must haves. But that comes at the cost of battery life…and modern inboard graphs can be quite good these days depending on your expectations!

An i9 laptop with onboard iris graphics seems a bit unbalanced to me.. Unless you need the extra compute power for raw data crunching or whatever.. Maybe a high end i5 or i7 with a GPU would be better balanced.

I’m a bit out of touch with AMD mobile CPUs but the same principal applies.. No point getting a power house CPU that the onboard graphics can’t keep up with in a gaming scenario if that’s a priority.

Same with screens.. On a laptop I’d probably stick to a 1080res screen but a better spec IPS or OLED panel rather than going for higher resolution on a poorer quality panel. ..

Better for the battery life and less strain on the graphics card.

For example I have no idea how

Ryzen 7 – 8840HS + Radeon 780M

Stacks up against an i9 with integrated iris graphics… But my gut feeling without spending hours looking into it, the AMD would be a better balanced system…

But then I don’t know how good the screen is etc… So it’s hard to say!

Of the ones you’ve listed I’d go with the middle one too, but that’s purely based on building 5 AMD desktops that have had zero issues and having an AMD laptop for work.

maybe get more adventurous with my game choice.

It wouldn’t be a total waste of time to look at refurbished gaming laptops though. Black Friday week, there’s going to be some deals about. eBuyer in particular are going daft with GPUs on eBay at the moment, so maybe they’re discounting laptops too.

I would imagine that £750 should see you well into Ryzen 7 and 3000-series RTX laptops, at least open box/refurbished.

That said.. An 8th gen Intel laptop chip is old hat however you look at it.

My laptop is 11gen i5 and it only has 4 physical cores! 8 cores if you include hyperthreading.

Doesn’t matter to me as I just use it for traveling and the iris graphics copes quite well with old or low demand games.

I don’t need serious compute power on the move.. . It’s just used for travel, and watching movies and TV, and casual office work, and very casual gaming so the OLED 1080 60hz screen is brilliant for that…

So I’d also look at screen size and panel type too!

There’s no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to laptops.

If you are looking at ASUS stuff.. Have a look at thier ‘expert book’ range as well as the Zen books.

I recently bought a new laptop with a Ryzen 7 8845HS plus Nvidia RTX 3050 6GB (Lenovo Ideapad Pro 5).

Couldn’t be happier. The processor is a beast. PassMark Multithread rating of 28820 and a single thread rating of 3770. It goes head-to-head with the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H (multithread 29303 / single thread 3702).

The 8840HS I believe is the lower wattage version i.e. slightly more energy efficient, at the expense of some top-end processing power.

Been using AMD Ryzen 5 / 7 laptops exclusively for the past few years and never had any issues.

Thanks everyone, I think I’m reassured that an AMD CPU is not a bad option for performance.

The two intel options have 2.8k OLED (90 and 120Hz) screens, the AMD just has 1080p 60Hz OLED.