4 ms·

Yeah, putting an i9 in any laptop that's not an XL gaming rig with big fans is very nearly always a waste of money (there might exist a few rare exceptions for

by mrandish 10mo ago

Yeah, putting an i9 in any laptop that's not an XL gaming rig with big fans is very nearly always a waste of money (there might exist a few rare exceptions for some oddball workloads). Manufacturers selling i9s in thin & light laptops at an ultra price premium may fall just short of the legal definition of fraud but it's as unconscionable as snake-oil audiophile companies selling $500 USB cables.

wtallis 10mo ago
That's still assigning too much significance to the "i9" naming. Sometimes, the only difference between the i9 part and the top i7 part was something like 200MHz of single-core boost frequency, with the core counts and cache sizes and maximum power limit all being equal. So quite often, the i7 has stood to gain just as much from a higher-power form factor as the i9.
gambiting 10mo ago
Tbf 2 jobs ago I had a Dell enterprise workstation laptop, an absolute behemoth of a thing, it was like 3.5kg, it was the thicker variant of the two available with extra cooling, specifically sold to companies like ours needing that extra firepower, and it had a 20 core i9, 128GB of DDR5 CAMM ram, and a 3080Ti - I think the market price of that thing was around £14k, it was insane. And it had exactly that kind of behaviour I described - I would start compiling something in Visual Studio, I would briefly see all cores jump to 4GHz and then immediately throttle down to 1.2GHz, to a point where the entire laptop was unresponsive while the compilation was ongoing. It was a joke of a machine - I think that's more of a fraud than what you described, because companies like ours were literally buying hundreds of these from Dell and they were literally unsuitable for their advertised use. (to add insult to the injury - that 3080Ti was literally pointless as the second you started playing any game the entire system would throttle so hard you had extreme stuttering in any game, it was like driving a lamborghini with a 5 second fuel reserve. And given that I worked at a games studio that was kinda an essential feature).

wtallis 10mo ago

That's still assigning too much significance to the "i9" naming. Sometimes, the only difference between the i9 part and the top i7 part was something like 200MHz of single-core boost frequency, with the core counts and cache sizes and maximum power limit all being equal. So quite often, the i7 has stood to gain just as much from a higher-power form factor as the i9.

gambiting 10mo ago

Tbf 2 jobs ago I had a Dell enterprise workstation laptop, an absolute behemoth of a thing, it was like 3.5kg, it was the thicker variant of the two available with extra cooling, specifically sold to companies like ours needing that extra firepower, and it had a 20 core i9, 128GB of DDR5 CAMM ram, and a 3080Ti - I think the market price of that thing was around £14k, it was insane. And it had exactly that kind of behaviour I described - I would start compiling something in Visual Studio, I would briefly see all cores jump to 4GHz and then immediately throttle down to 1.2GHz, to a point where the entire laptop was unresponsive while the compilation was ongoing. It was a joke of a machine - I think that's more of a fraud than what you described, because companies like ours were literally buying hundreds of these from Dell and they were literally unsuitable for their advertised use. (to add insult to the injury - that 3080Ti was literally pointless as the second you started playing any game the entire system would throttle so hard you had extreme stuttering in any game, it was like driving a lamborghini with a 5 second fuel reserve. And given that I worked at a games studio that was kinda an essential feature).