Gaming on a Ryzen 9 4900HS Laptop with a Discrete GPU

[Squid Surprise]

The Ryzen 3000 series laptop CPUs were OK for productivity but lagged behind Intel for gaming. The Ryzen 4000 series CPUs were a slam dunk for productivity but we did not know if that would translate to gaming. Maybe Zen2's latency was still too much of a problem and gaming would suffer.

Yes... and? This article is seeing if it games as well as an equivalent Intel laptop... but there is NO equivalent Intel laptop... so we still don't know which is better... we can GUESS - but we could ALREADY GUESS after the first article Techspot released showing productivity benchmarks.

At least with a 2060 MQ, that ended up not being the case. Actually I was expecting the gaming numbers for Ryzen 4000 to be lower. And even with 2060MQ vs 2060, there is variability in each chassis. Sometimes the 2060MQ beats the 2060 with the same CPU. Have a look at Jarrod's Tech for comparos on this.

Irrelevant... but thanks for sharing

 

[Lew Zealand]

Yes... and? This article is seeing if it games as well as an equivalent Intel laptop... but there is NO equivalent Intel laptop... so we still don't know which is better... we can GUESS - but we could ALREADY GUESS after the first article Techspot released showing productivity benchmarks.

Irrelevant... but thanks for sharing

If you're happy to guess, then that's OK. I'm not happy with that. I follow game benchmarks on laptops via Jarrod's Tech, which is irrelevant to you but not me. He mentions time and again:

There are almost no equivalent laptops. The few that are close have identical mobo/CPUs with swapped Gfx.

Your dream comparo will not happen as that chassis consistency doesn't exist.. The differences between chassis are greater than the individual components in them so even comparing an Intel to a Ryzen with the same GPU has too many differences under the hood to be relevant.

I'll put this another way:

The variation between i7-9750 + 2060 MQ laptops will probably be greater than the difference between those laptops and this Ryzen one on most games. Once again, I'd like to see the data to prove this right or wring.

 

[Squid Surprise]

If you're happy to guess, then that's OK. I'm not happy with that. I follow game benchmarks on laptops via Jarrod's Tech, which is irrelevant to you but not me. He mentions time and again:

There are almost no equivalent laptops. The few that are close have identical mobo/CPUs with swapped Gfx.

Your dream comparo will not happen as that chassis consistency doesn't exist.. The differences between chassis are greater than the individual components in them so even comparing an Intel to a Ryzen with the same GPU has too many differences under the hood to be relevant.

I'll put this another way:

The variation between i7-9750 + 2060 MQ laptops will probably be greater than the difference between those laptops and this Ryzen one on most games. Once again, I'd like to see the data to prove this right or wring.

I agree - hence I don't understand why this article was written... My apologies for the previous post - thought you were the same person who was arguing with me before!

 

[koreymac1988]

I don't know if availability was an issue, however, it would be nice to see a 1 to 1 comparison with an equal GPU. The Ryzen system had the weakest one in the stack (The MaxxQ is a cut down version of a regular RTX), so, apples to oranges, this benchmark series is incorrect. Anyone arguing otherwise is flat ridiculous, you have no argument.

With that being said, with an actual 2060 vs 2060 battle, they will most likely be tied. Using a 4800HS with a 2060 (They exist) would have been a better comparison than this.

 

[Lew Zealand]

You'll notice that everyone who reviewed a Ryzen 4xxx laptop reviewed the exact same laptop. There was nothing else available, it was this one or nothing.

 

[godrilla]

I would be interested in how this 4900HS would perform in an Ultrabook attached to a 2080 Ti external GPU gaming box.

Intel still didn't license thunderbolt 3 to AMD. AMD needs to come up with an alternative to thunderbolt. Also I've seen videos where the 2080ti is bottlenecked by thunderbolt 3. It seems that the 2080 would be the sweet spot to maximize the bandwidth of thunderbolt 3 without losing performance to bottleneck.

 

[xhajsd1232]

I would be interested in how this 4900HS would perform in an Ultrabook attached to a 2080 Ti external GPU gaming box.

nice idea

 

[Foobario]

Really? That's not how benchmarks work... I suggest you actually READ the article - it even admits that they wanted to make an apples-to-apples comparison... they couldn't!

Now, at this point, most people would either A) not write the article or B) Change the article to something that they could do - like "is it worth buying the 4900 in a laptop" or some such...

They did neither... Techspot decided to go ahead with their benchmarks, spending tons of time telling us completely irrelevant information...

Please tell me where I've gone wrong - I'm all ears!

For someone that found the article useless and a waste of time, you sure have spent a lot more time rambling on about your disappointment with it.

I can only imagine how much more productive your day could have been if you hadn't had the misfortune of stumbling across this review article.

 

[Lew Zealand]

Intel still didn't license thunderbolt 3 to AMD. AMD needs to come up with an alternative to thunderbolt. Also I've seen videos where the 2080ti is bottlenecked by thunderbolt 3. It seems that the 2080 would be the sweet spot to maximize the bandwidth of thunderbolt 3 without losing performance to bottleneck.

All graphics cards are bottlenecked by Thunderbolt 3. Not only because of the 1/4 bandwidth restriction but also by latency caused by the translation of PCIe to TB. That's a pretty light translation but it still needs to be done and takes a toll.

When I was running a GTX 1060 6GB connected to a NUC7i7 via an Akitio Node eGPU box, I compared it's Time Spy and Fire Strike scores to a Pentium G4620 and GTX 1060 6GB (same speed 2C4T CPU) and the Pentium/1060 with it's full 16x PCIe 3.0 native connection was around 20% faster. Might have been 25%, it's been a while and I don't recall exactly.

 

[Squid Surprise]

For someone that found the article useless and a waste of time, you sure have spent a lot more time rambling on about your disappointment with it.

I can only imagine how much more productive your day could have been if you hadn't had the misfortune of stumbling across this review article.

Had you read my first post, you’d remember there’s a pandemic on right now... I have nothing but time...

 

[m-tec]

Does this laptop lose performance when not connected to the mains? I'd like a laptop for photo and video editing, but don't want to spend a fortune or get a workout from a heavy laptop!

 

[Lew Zealand]

Does this laptop lose performance when not connected to the mains? I'd like a laptop for photo and video editing, but don't want to spend a fortune or get a workout from a heavy laptop!

Laptops like this only cut performance on battery while playing 3D games. Photo and video editing will not, but an extended video encode which leverages the GPU, like Adobe Premiere, will kill the battery in any laptop. Best to do that work connected to wall power.

 

[Angga B]

To honor amd ryzen 4000 launch I just bought an envyx360 15 with 3700u. Why not, performance is good, price on discount is good.

As much as I like ryzen 4000 performance my current limited budget wouldn't allow me to. Until next time then, amd.

 

[Squid Surprise]

This is actually a great time to buy previous gen laptops.... what with the Corona virus screwing with people, last gen is basically current gen - yet selling at a discount!