General Discussions

[black_zion]

While the AMD model will sport faster RAM, it is going to be a pretty good direct comparison between price, performance, and features...

[pokester]

Unfortunately no price on the AMD system choices. 

[black_zion]

I was going to add more to that but I wanted Anandtech to have a chance to source some prices from Dell, but they haven't and Dell hasn't put up a product page for it. TomsHardware reported earlier this year that an AMD Renoir powered Dell G5 15SE would start at $799.99, which sounds about right given it's going to have faster RAM than the Intel variant, BUT if you compare the Intel G5 15 variant, it's going to come with a much better screen as standard.

This all goes back to the "You have to pay more for less to get All AMD" argument in the other thread which was exemplified then by the Surface Laptop AMD vs Intel with the AMD variant being far worse for the same price than Intel, and these laptops will really serve as part two of that battle since the base specs are pretty awful, it'll make for a good comparison at...I'd say $1200, since the 128GB storage on both models is going to have to be raised to at least double that.

[pokester]

I have pretty much vowed to never do an AMD laptop again. Out of 6 I have owned personally and about another 20 I tried at work. All but one were huge disappointments that all suffered driver issues, if the drivers installed at all properly other than the shipping drivers, then support was dropped before anything ever worked right. About the only way I would consider it would be if it had a non ryzen apu and a discrete gpu that works, and that isn't likely based on recent history. 

[black_zion]

It all comes back to the drivers, and it's true. Aside from the numerous issues plaguing the entire product stack it seems, and the fact the interface is extremely overly bloated for a laptop form factor, with a desktop you have more flexibility. For example, someone new can go out and get an X570 motherboard and Ryzen 3950X, but they don't have to pair it with a RX 5700XT, they can choose a Polaris or Vega card because they have numerous driver releases, some of which won't have any issues. A laptop, however, if you want a modern processor, you must choose a modern GPU which may only have one driver release and may be buggy as heck, or not even have any drivers at all. Correct me if I'm wrong but I seem to remember at least one time AMD put out a mobile product and the only driver support came from the OEMs for at least a month before AMD released a driver package for it. I may be imagining that, it's late and I'm half asleep.

This isn't a problem for nVidia who has a lightweight control panel perfect for laptops as well as rock solid drivers, and you can bet it isn't a problem with Intel who, in preparation for their Xe cards, have started releasing their own drivers, which I haven't heard anything bad about yet personally, they're not going to develop some bloated Adrenaline 2020 style GUI when their dedicated Xe cards release, likely they're going to go with either an nVidia Control Panel type setup or, if the Intel SSD Toolbox is anything to go by, a tabbed interface which is compact, intuitive, and functional.

It really would be nice if AMD released non APU mobile CPUs to be paired only with a discrete AMD mobile video card. Yes it'd reduce battery life a bit, but desktop cards at idle only draw about 4w, so I doubt it would reduce it much, but you'd have one GPU in the system, no driver conflicts between the two GPUs, no need to deal with "This program is not using my dedicated card" issues...

[black_zion]

Wanted to post an update as Dell now has a product page up for it. As it stands right now it's a fairly valid comparison, as the 10750H has a slightly higher IPC while the 4800H has 2 more cores, but Intel's next generation mobile CPUs are due out soon. The 5600M and mobile RTX 2060 are essentially equal in performance as well.

It seems like a good deal, for $180 less you get faster RAM, a faster (when fully loaded) processor, supposedly faster graphics due to SmartShift when the processor isn't fully loaded and there's power and thermal headroom. It will be interesting if a reputable site is able to do a review of these two models since it is the first time SmartShift is being seen, as well as a very rare opportunity to compare essentially equally performing, on paper, variants from both sides.

I also added in the comparison the i5 and 4600H models.

[black_zion]

I did also want to post a link to the review Hothardware did on the G5 15 SE with the Ryzen 4800H. AMD's SpeedShift does give a tangible benefit, 11% in Cinebench R20, 2% in PCMark 10, 7% in SoTR, and 2% in Far Cry 5.

It must be said, however, that to get these numbers the laptop got quite warm and very loud, 55dB loud, which while not a completely terrible thing for gamers, since they can use headphones, incorporating this technology into a mobile workstation may be difficult since having a machine cranking out the noise level of a household refrigerator (which also hits 55dB on the dB charts) is far from ideal, and will hinder other tasks.

It also must be said that computational tasks may be where SpeedShift brings the most advantage, as in games you're talking about single digit FPS gains you can count on one hand, nothing you'll even notice likely, whereas with computational tasks, and I'll quote their Cinebench R20 chart, it's allowing performance to match or exceed the next tier, in this case the 4800H exceeds the 4900H in the much more vaunted ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14.

https://hothardware.com/reviews/dell-g5-15-se-review?page=1