 Intel, what the heck are you doing? You finally brought 10 nanometer to a high powered CPU and according to our testing, it's the fastest gaming processor you can get in a laptop. But to show it off, you sent us this, this undercooled, underpowered, sad excuse of a gaming laptop that I would be embarrassed to put my logo on. Do you have any idea how close we were to declaring your 11th gen H series processors uncompetitive crap? Thankfully for you, before we could publish, we got a proper gaming laptop, thank you Gigabyte, that manages to outperform this Core i9 junk pile in spite of the fact that it only has a Core i7, an incident that really drives home how you and Nvidia and AMD for that matter, have made the process of buying a laptop an inscrutable mess where everything is made up and the specs don't matter. What does matter is the segue to our sponsor, GlassWire. With GlassWire, you can instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device. Use offer code Linus to get 25% off at the link below. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's kick off with the good news. The Core i7-11800H and our Gigabyte AORUS 15P here is a beast. I mean, honestly, I thought our Asus Strixcar G733 with its AMD Ryzen 5900HX would ground pound this poor thing, but that was not the case at all. Both laptops feature an Nvidia RTX 3080 with 130 watt TDP and in our selection of CPU bound games, the i7 took a convincing lead in every single one. But how? In a big shocker to everyone, maybe even themselves, Intel finally shipped a high performance CPU that isn't on 14 nanometer. This, this is 10 nanometer super fin fed baby and it's real good. I'm still surprised. I mean, after Intel promised that Rocket Lake would be 20% faster and then that turned into 20% faster in certain AVX workloads, but actually overall the same or slightly worse, I didn't think this could happen, but our tests don't lie. Now I should mention that we don't have a proper 10th gen CPU from Intel to test directly against, but the thing is a new champion only has to defeat the previous champion. So I guess we don't really need one. Moving on, in Spec Workstation, an hours long CPU test that runs through a wide variety of workstation tasks, the i7 11800H, which has the same eight cores and 16 threads bested the Ryzen 9 5900X in the vast majority of tasks. Now there are certainly still places that Ryzen is king. Heavily multi-threaded applications like video or photo rendering continue to favor Team Red, but it seems like Intel has done a really good job of boosting hard in single threaded or even moderately threaded workloads. So situations where four cores are getting hit instead of all eight are where Intel shines. Back to the point I was making earlier, however, you wanna know what else are Intel Core i7 11800H bested in nearly every test? The Core i9 11980HK. Yes, i2 was surprised at first, but then looking at the two laptops we have on hand, the reason is fairly obvious. The Aorus 15P offers significantly more cooling and power to its i7 than our MSI made Intel reference system gives to its i9. And with how dependent these 11th gen chips are on aggressively turboing, that's gonna have an outsized impact on performance. I mean, I get the point that Intel was trying to make sending this slim, sexy reference system. They wanted to show us that they could compete with this new class of high-performance thin and lights that AMD currently dominates with designs like the ROG Flow X13. But what they ended up showing us is that, no, they actually can't. Because the secret sauce that makes an eight core CPU perform well in a design like this is efficiency. And Intel is still struggling to deliver. This is a problem industry-wide right now, with Nvidia's 3000 series mobile processors being a prime example. There are real world situations where an RTX 3070 mobile can outperform an RTX 3080 mobile. That is if the 3070 gets more power and more cooling. Now under pressure from customers and media, Nvidia has started disclosing the TDPs of their mobile GPUs on a product by product basis. So this problem has been addressed somewhat, but it hasn't been entirely solved. And it's a lot more complicated with CPUs. Now I could advocate for strict adherence by OEMs to stick to Intel's TDP, similar to the multi-threaded enhancement debacle with the eighth gen desktop chips. But the issue is that in laptops, I don't actually think everyone completely playing by the rules is a good solution. This would bring CPU temperatures down across the board on laptops, and it would make comparison shopping between various devices easier. But it would also mean that performance is being left on the table. I mean, I still don't like it, but outside of the biggest beefiest laptops, a mobile CPU is supposed to be at or close to a hundred degrees under full load. That's when it's performing its best. And given that all the MacBook Pros from 2016 aren't dead yet, it stands to reason that running at 80 degrees probably isn't necessary. So then what needs to change is how mobile CPUs are marketed. Having a core i9-11980HK that can boost up to 4.9 gigahertz on four cores, that sounds amazing. But having four cores that boost to 4.9 gigahertz for a couple of nanoseconds before overwhelming your laptop's cooler and VRMs only to drop down to 2.8 is not amazing. So what we're asking is for you to take some pride in your processors Intel, like we do with our water bottles on lttstore.com. It's gonna be a lot of work, but the thing is you've run programs like this before. Create a certification process to ensure that when someone buys a laptop with an 11th gen i9 core H badge on it, that's gonna mean that they have the fastest gaming CPU out there. Not that they got screwed out of $200 that they could have easily saved by getting the same or even better performance with a core i7. Now I would suggest that part of this validation would be ensuring that the laptop can actually deliver turbo boost speeds for an extended period of time. Let's say a target somewhere between two or five minutes, and then you lay down the law. You tell your partners that if you can't handle it, then you're locked to core i7 or even core i5 for that matter on that design. Because until you guys fix this, consumers are forced to rely on third party reviews or knowledgeable sales representatives to figure out how a laptop is gonna perform. And you aren't gonna be creating a lot of goodwill when they end up with a device that they thought was fast. They thought it was top of the line and then discover later that it's not. Or if you wanna do none of that, at least don't make the reference sample of your brand new CPU that you give to reviewers an underpowered mess. Gigabyte really saved your butts here, sending over a product that offers stellar gaming and all around performance at a reasonable thickness with a good looking 240 Hertz display. Like guys, if you're gonna create the fastest mobile on the block, you should be making sure that that's what we're focused on when we're reviewing the product. So we don't think to talk about something like battery life until we're deep into our testing, which, oh, I guess we're there now. So yeah, the Aorus 15P managed five hours and 18 minutes of battery life from its 99 watt hour battery, which for context is quite literally the largest battery capacity possible to put in a laptop by law. Now I would expect a similarly equipped AMD laptop to get more like nine to 10 hours. So there's still a very strong case to be made for choosing Ryzen. We do plan on getting some more laptops that are actually identical except for which team they bat for to properly tell you which one is best. But for now, at least what we can say is if you go out and buy a laptop with a blue badge, you might be giving up some battery life, but you are not automatically an idiot. There's a lot of good blue team designs out there. Thunderbolt 4 offers fast IO and easy docking and oh, those sweet, sweet FPS. My big complaint right now is that I wish that when you saw a Core i9 badge, you knew how much performance you were actually getting. You know what never underperforms though? 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Also, they have full-length audio books now so premium subscribers even get special pricing up to 65% off, go check it out. And if you're done watching, maybe check out our video, RTX 3080 Mobile is complicated because making an informed decision while buying a laptop now is shockingly tough.