Based on initial testing it looks like the 4900HS IGP performs on par and sometimes much better than a discrete Nvidia MX250 GPU.
I very much want to see laptops using these H series CPU with IGP only. It should be easy enough to just cut the DGPU and it's price out of the gaming units.
Such laptops would be great for anybody that wants/needs CPU power but isn't heavy into gaming. The IGP is still powerful enough for casual games like Rocket League, DOTA, LOL, etc.
The Asus Zephryus with 1TB SSD, 16GB DDR4 3200, 1080 120Hz, and the RTX 2060 is like $1500. Just remove the GPU and cut the price by $250-300 and you'd have a really great budget workstation (with even better battery life and lower weight).
Make that $1,100 retail without the 1660ti...I could recommend it as a premium option. Actually I'd like to see a good budget variant 4800H/S at $700 retail as well. Even if it's heavier plastic, 1080 60Hz, 1x8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, etc. as long as it's easily upgraded.
I know lots of people who need computing power and are stuck with a desktop because there's literally no laptop options for them. Something fairly portable, with as much CPU power as you can get with minimum 5 hours of working battery, and not crazy expensive. These people don't just fart around on Facebook, the U series chips have always been laughable for real work.
Past couple years it has been possible to get a decently portable gaming laptop, but it was either incredibly expensive ($1,600+) and/or had terrible battery life. These new Ryzen 4000 H series chips are fast enough, efficient enough, and cheap enough to make an amazing work laptop.
It's actually quite infuriating that everybody insists you absolutely MUST HAVE A GAMING GPU or you can't possibly need any performance at all... If you seriously think only gamers need a proper CPU please just go away, you obviously don't know anything about computers (not aimed at you Alistair).
You're exactly right. My dream laptop is a light portable version of my Acer Aspire E5 573-G that can play Rocket League on par with a PS4. I could do all my programming work on that, throw it in my backpack, cycle home and do some light gaming all on a single charge.
Of course there are options, they just aren't willing to pay for them. $1600 is not at all expensive considering that you want both portability and power, and something like the Dell XPS 15 is fairly representative for non-gaming, high-end laptops for work.
I agree that one of these without a dGPU would make a great workstation. I have a 17" Dell Mobile precision laptop (bought in 2016) with XEON cpu - it cost almost $5K new (a lot of that was the Quadro M5000M). Amazing that I could replace this with something much faster for 1/4 the cost. My work load is programming, industrial automation, and scientific computations , and I typically am running 2 or 3 virtual machines at any given time. I also travel a lot, so a desktop doesn't work. These new mobile Ryzen cpus look absolutely amazing without any dGPU.
Exactly, though, it needs to be in TDP-up mode to run at 35-45Watts, AND it has to have enough cooling to hold that level. I remember some of the 2xxx and 3xxx APU laptops that had decent processors, but had such poor cooling solutions that they thermally throttled very early. Just a for-instance, the Apire 5 models with the 2xxx processors came with lowish TDP settings and a barely adequate thermal management system. It was a popular mod to get the larger hearsink from the related Nitro, which used the same motherboard and chassis design, but with a dGPU, and replace the one on the Aspire. Combined with good thermal paste, and the software to modify the TDP, It would hold maximum boost numbers for quite a long time, provided that the vents were clear.
I'd love to see a 4800u laptop with a great cooling setup, a solid 1080p/60 screen, wifi 6, 16gb of LPDDR4X RAM, an NVME slot, a 2.5" bay, and a 95wh battery in a non-gaudy, but well ventilated not too slim case. It would probably be very profitable even at $700.
Early reports on the Asus Zephryus G14 are suggesting 6-10 hours with the 4900HS, 16GB DDR4 3200, 1TB SSD, 1080 120Hz, and the RTX2060.
It's got the CPU performance and battery life, good build quality, now just drop the DGPU to get us closer to the magic $1,000 and it's a winner for premium work laptop.
Would compare very well to a desktop 2700 build at $800-1,000 (depending on options) Unfortunately the desktop chips do require a DGPU if you want a good CPU. With these new laptop APUs though, you're no longer stuck with a desktop + DGPU. I'd very much like to see it happen, and again I know many others would too.
My guess is, most likely in the design pipeline. Enterprise hardware should naturally take longer to validate (more, and more rigorous, testing required), and ought to require higher-quality production lines (that introduce fewer defects and variances) - which for new hardware and designs would take time to stabilize.
Actually, what would be nice is to see HDMI 2.1 48 Gbps finally show up so we could get some options with good resolution AND refresh rate (with full color).
1440p is a good size for a 14-16" laptop screen, sure it doesn't have the perfect crispness of a 4K display, but you can run the desktop 1:1 and get decent font sizes, and with a dGPU gaming is still reasonable at native res (although upscaling is pretty decent these days depending on GPU vendor).
Even better would be a non-16:9 2560x1600, but the chances of that ...
HP has a very nice, inexpensive laptop using the 3500U. Priced around $700 CAD. We just bought 30-odd units to facilitate work-from-home. Comes with Windows 10 Home, but runs Ubuntu 18.04 without issues.
If they updated this with a 4000-series APU, added an extra Type-C port to replace the power plug, and a 1440p screen, (and an option for 16 GB of RAM) it would be pretty much perfect.
I am looking for a 4K version, no Nvidia GPU (although I will take one if I have to have it). I use a triple 4K desktop... everything below 4k just sucks for me at this point. I've been using 4K since 2015 and there have been 3k-4k laptops from Intel since that same time.
Not everybody needs a portable supercomputer, especially when we already have a gaming PC at home.
I just need something light weight for browsing, streaming, and typing that can occasionally play casual games like CS:GO, FIFA or Football Manager, but with 10+ hours battery life.
What I want to see is a sub-$400 thin-and-light with Ryzen 3 4000 or Athlon 400U with integrated Vega 3 GPU.
Acer almost hit a home run with the 2019 Acer Swift 3 SF314-41 with Athlon 300U. For $360 (!) you'd get a 14" 1080p IPS display, backlit keyboard, fingerprint scanner, 512GB NVME SSD, full metal body (top and bottom), slim bezels, 1.45kg (3.2lbs), and 48Wh / 7 hours battery life (web browsing).
I'd like to see that config but in the 2020 Swift 3 body, with only 1.2kg/2.6lbs weight. That would be PERFECT!
On YouTube I saw the insides of the Zephyrus G14 and it had only one stick of 16GB ram and there did not appear to be a slot for another stick of ram. How are they getting the performance numbers in all the reviews w/o using two sticks of ram to enable dual channel? I thought two sticks of ram was critical to get best performance from Ryzen-at least on a desktop. Is there something different in the way AMD's Renoir for laptops is designed?
It could be that one channel is soldered on the motherboard. There have been several previous laptops with Ryzen APUs that had 4 or 8GB of ram soldered on the motherboard and a slot for the second channel. It doesn't seem to make a huge difference in performance.
The Acer Swift 3 seems insane. $700 CAD with 512GB SSD, what seems like a decent design, battery life, and display, along with the 6 core part? This is ridiculous - 3 years ago wasn't top end mobile 2 core 4 thread parts?
Word of warning... most of these laptops (at least the ones that were reviewed) such as Asus ones and the MSI one have poor cooling. The CPU despite being efficient gets up to or over 90 degrees Celsius if its fully stressed in games or productivity workloads. These are NOT acceptable temperatures.
Adding to that, virtually no OEM's (apart from MSI and Dell) offer an all AMD solution using Zen 2 and Navi such as 5600m or 5700m.
The Dell unit has not been reviewed yet, but I'm not optimistic with Dell's past problems with thermals.
OEM's are quite reckless.
On top of that the Asus G15 has soldered 8 GB of RAM with only 1 available RAM slot for upgrade... this isn't viable... certainly not in 2020 where they shouldn't be soldering RAM in a 15" unit, least of all they should NOT solder only 8GB. In 2012 you could get away with that, but not in 2020.
Until OEM's come out with a laptop which has acceptable temperatures (UP TO 80 degrees C on both CPU and GPU when FULLY stressed) with not much noise, I'm not getting this.
I'd sooner opt to get the Acer Predator Helios 500 PH517-61 (if I can find it to buy in UK for an acceptable price).
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EliteRetard - Tuesday, March 31, 2020 - link
Based on initial testing it looks like the 4900HS IGP performs on par and sometimes much better than a discrete Nvidia MX250 GPU.I very much want to see laptops using these H series CPU with IGP only.
It should be easy enough to just cut the DGPU and it's price out of the gaming units.
Such laptops would be great for anybody that wants/needs CPU power but isn't heavy into gaming. The IGP is still powerful enough for casual games like Rocket League, DOTA, LOL, etc.
The Asus Zephryus with 1TB SSD, 16GB DDR4 3200, 1080 120Hz, and the RTX 2060 is like $1500. Just remove the GPU and cut the price by $250-300 and you'd have a really great budget workstation (with even better battery life and lower weight).
Alistair - Tuesday, March 31, 2020 - link
They do have a very inexpensive Zephyrus G14 model coming. The base model is $1050.Alistair - Tuesday, March 31, 2020 - link
GA401IH-BR7N2BL (gray), $1,050: FHD 60Hz, Ryzen 7 4800HS, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD, GeForce GTX 1650Alistair - Tuesday, March 31, 2020 - link
What you want is this one:GA401IU-BS76 (gray) $1,300: FHD 120Hz, Ryzen 7 4800HS, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q
EliteRetard - Tuesday, March 31, 2020 - link
Make that $1,100 retail without the 1660ti...I could recommend it as a premium option.Actually I'd like to see a good budget variant 4800H/S at $700 retail as well. Even if it's heavier plastic, 1080 60Hz, 1x8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, etc. as long as it's easily upgraded.
I know lots of people who need computing power and are stuck with a desktop because there's literally no laptop options for them. Something fairly portable, with as much CPU power as you can get with minimum 5 hours of working battery, and not crazy expensive. These people don't just fart around on Facebook, the U series chips have always been laughable for real work.
Past couple years it has been possible to get a decently portable gaming laptop, but it was either incredibly expensive ($1,600+) and/or had terrible battery life. These new Ryzen 4000 H series chips are fast enough, efficient enough, and cheap enough to make an amazing work laptop.
It's actually quite infuriating that everybody insists you absolutely MUST HAVE A GAMING GPU or you can't possibly need any performance at all... If you seriously think only gamers need a proper CPU please just go away, you obviously don't know anything about computers (not aimed at you Alistair).
otaconjh - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
You're exactly right. My dream laptop is a light portable version of my Acer Aspire E5 573-G that can play Rocket League on par with a PS4.I could do all my programming work on that, throw it in my backpack, cycle home and do some light gaming all on a single charge.
Rookierookie - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
Of course there are options, they just aren't willing to pay for them. $1600 is not at all expensive considering that you want both portability and power, and something like the Dell XPS 15 is fairly representative for non-gaming, high-end laptops for work.kmmatney - Sunday, May 3, 2020 - link
I agree that one of these without a dGPU would make a great workstation. I have a 17" Dell Mobile precision laptop (bought in 2016) with XEON cpu - it cost almost $5K new (a lot of that was the Quadro M5000M). Amazing that I could replace this with something much faster for 1/4 the cost. My work load is programming, industrial automation, and scientific computations , and I typically am running 2 or 3 virtual machines at any given time. I also travel a lot, so a desktop doesn't work. These new mobile Ryzen cpus look absolutely amazing without any dGPU.jeremyshaw - Tuesday, March 31, 2020 - link
Those people can be easily served by a 4800U.lightningz71 - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
Exactly, though, it needs to be in TDP-up mode to run at 35-45Watts, AND it has to have enough cooling to hold that level. I remember some of the 2xxx and 3xxx APU laptops that had decent processors, but had such poor cooling solutions that they thermally throttled very early. Just a for-instance, the Apire 5 models with the 2xxx processors came with lowish TDP settings and a barely adequate thermal management system. It was a popular mod to get the larger hearsink from the related Nitro, which used the same motherboard and chassis design, but with a dGPU, and replace the one on the Aspire. Combined with good thermal paste, and the software to modify the TDP, It would hold maximum boost numbers for quite a long time, provided that the vents were clear.I'd love to see a 4800u laptop with a great cooling setup, a solid 1080p/60 screen, wifi 6, 16gb of LPDDR4X RAM, an NVME slot, a 2.5" bay, and a 95wh battery in a non-gaudy, but well ventilated not too slim case. It would probably be very profitable even at $700.
MadGunz396 - Saturday, April 4, 2020 - link
These are mobile apu's. We're literally garunteed, just like last time, to get a crop of 2-in-one just like last time.Personally I want to see someone other than Dell making an all AMD laptop woth the ryzen 9 and modile navi.
Hulk - Tuesday, March 31, 2020 - link
Very interested in finally seeing some benchmarks, especially battery life.EliteRetard - Tuesday, March 31, 2020 - link
Early reports on the Asus Zephryus G14 are suggesting 6-10 hours with the 4900HS, 16GB DDR4 3200, 1TB SSD, 1080 120Hz, and the RTX2060.It's got the CPU performance and battery life, good build quality, now just drop the DGPU to get us closer to the magic $1,000 and it's a winner for premium work laptop.
Would compare very well to a desktop 2700 build at $800-1,000 (depending on options)
Unfortunately the desktop chips do require a DGPU if you want a good CPU.
With these new laptop APUs though, you're no longer stuck with a desktop + DGPU.
I'd very much like to see it happen, and again I know many others would too.
PCPartPicker Part List: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/QQVFx6
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700 3.2 GHz 8-Core Processor ($149.99 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: MSI B450 TOMAHAWK MAX ATX AM4 Motherboard ($114.99 @ Best Buy)
Memory: GeIL EVO POTENZA 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory ($67.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Crucial MX500 1 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($114.99 @ Adorama)
Video Card: Gigabyte Radeon RX 570 4 GB GAMING Video Card ($119.99 @ Newegg)
Case: Cougar MX330 ATX Mid Tower Case ($39.95 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: EVGA GD (2019) 600 W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Power Supply ($67.97 @ Newegg)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Home Full 32/64-bit ($119.04 @ HP)
Monitor: Lenovo L24q 23.8" 2560x1440 60 Hz Monitor ($159.99 @ Best Buy)
Total: $954.90
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-03-31 20:23 EDT-0400
eva02langley - Tuesday, March 31, 2020 - link
Where is my damn slim ultrabook with 1440p IPS freesync screen without dGPU?!!!benedict - Tuesday, March 31, 2020 - link
Those are all gaming laptops. What about enterprise laptops?boeush - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
My guess is, most likely in the design pipeline. Enterprise hardware should naturally take longer to validate (more, and more rigorous, testing required), and ought to require higher-quality production lines (that introduce fewer defects and variances) - which for new hardware and designs would take time to stabilize.SolarBear28 - Thursday, April 2, 2020 - link
Some Thinkpads (T, L and X series) have been leaked and are rumoured to launch in the next few months.vladx - Tuesday, March 31, 2020 - link
No 4K/UHD screen, no thanksEliteRetard - Tuesday, March 31, 2020 - link
Do you actually need 4k on the laptop?I'm sure that'll be an option at some point, but for now some of the units do have 2560x1440.
EliteRetard - Tuesday, March 31, 2020 - link
Actually, what would be nice is to see HDMI 2.1 48 Gbps finally show up so we could get some options with good resolution AND refresh rate (with full color).psychobriggsy - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
1440p is a good size for a 14-16" laptop screen, sure it doesn't have the perfect crispness of a 4K display, but you can run the desktop 1:1 and get decent font sizes, and with a dGPU gaming is still reasonable at native res (although upscaling is pretty decent these days depending on GPU vendor).Even better would be a non-16:9 2560x1600, but the chances of that ...
vladx - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
Yep, in 2020 less than 4K is unnacceptable in a laptop imolioncat55 - Tuesday, March 31, 2020 - link
I am really interested to see what how this looks for AMDs 25 x 20 goal.cigar3tte - Tuesday, March 31, 2020 - link
I'm hopng for a 2-in-1 laptop under 3lb based on the Ryzen 4000 series, hopefully under $1K.satai - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
Can't wait for the work ones. No nvidia, good keyboard and linux compatibility.phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
HP has a very nice, inexpensive laptop using the 3500U. Priced around $700 CAD. We just bought 30-odd units to facilitate work-from-home. Comes with Windows 10 Home, but runs Ubuntu 18.04 without issues.https://www8.hp.com/ca/en/laptops/product-details/...
If they updated this with a 4000-series APU, added an extra Type-C port to replace the power plug, and a 1440p screen, (and an option for 16 GB of RAM) it would be pretty much perfect.
alamilla - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
I'm looking for Dell to bring this to their XPS line!Jimster480 - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
I've been waiting for a AMD powered XPS for years.ardni - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
I've been waiting for 15" xps line, 4900H, no GPU. 16:10 screen.ads295 - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
Intel probably still paying Dell not to.Jimster480 - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
I am looking for a 4K version, no Nvidia GPU (although I will take one if I have to have it).I use a triple 4K desktop... everything below 4k just sucks for me at this point. I've been using 4K since 2015 and there have been 3k-4k laptops from Intel since that same time.
Its about time we have some 4K AMD laptops.
elzafir - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
Not everybody needs a portable supercomputer, especially when we already have a gaming PC at home.I just need something light weight for browsing, streaming, and typing that can occasionally play casual games like CS:GO, FIFA or Football Manager, but with 10+ hours battery life.
What I want to see is a sub-$400 thin-and-light with Ryzen 3 4000 or Athlon 400U with integrated Vega 3 GPU.
Acer almost hit a home run with the 2019 Acer Swift 3 SF314-41 with Athlon 300U. For $360 (!) you'd get a 14" 1080p IPS display, backlit keyboard, fingerprint scanner, 512GB NVME SSD, full metal body (top and bottom), slim bezels, 1.45kg (3.2lbs), and 48Wh / 7 hours battery life (web browsing).
I'd like to see that config but in the 2020 Swift 3 body, with only 1.2kg/2.6lbs weight. That would be PERFECT!
jrobrtsn16 - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
On YouTube I saw the insides of the Zephyrus G14 and it had only one stick of 16GB ram and there did not appear to be a slot for another stick of ram. How are they getting the performance numbers in all the reviews w/o using two sticks of ram to enable dual channel? I thought two sticks of ram was critical to get best performance from Ryzen-at least on a desktop. Is there something different in the way AMD's Renoir for laptops is designed?lightningz71 - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
It could be that one channel is soldered on the motherboard. There have been several previous laptops with Ryzen APUs that had 4 or 8GB of ram soldered on the motherboard and a slot for the second channel. It doesn't seem to make a huge difference in performance.Rookierookie - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
It's soldered + 1 DIMM.But I always thought the dual-channel thing had more to do with integrated graphics performance.
Kishoreshack - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
AMD is Kicking some a**Intel is crying
geokon - Thursday, April 2, 2020 - link
The Swift 3 SF314-42 link is dead nowSub31 - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
The Acer Swift 3 seems insane. $700 CAD with 512GB SSD, what seems like a decent design, battery life, and display, along with the 6 core part? This is ridiculous - 3 years ago wasn't top end mobile 2 core 4 thread parts?Maksdampf - Monday, April 6, 2020 - link
So where is the Review today?"While we're still working on our full review for next Monday[...]"
lestatfix - Monday, April 6, 2020 - link
Soldered memory on Zephyrus g14 is 8GB already right? With only one slot available, how can we set it to 32GB?deksman2 - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Word of warning... most of these laptops (at least the ones that were reviewed) such as Asus ones and the MSI one have poor cooling.The CPU despite being efficient gets up to or over 90 degrees Celsius if its fully stressed in games or productivity workloads.
These are NOT acceptable temperatures.
Adding to that, virtually no OEM's (apart from MSI and Dell) offer an all AMD solution using Zen 2 and Navi such as 5600m or 5700m.
The Dell unit has not been reviewed yet, but I'm not optimistic with Dell's past problems with thermals.
OEM's are quite reckless.
On top of that the Asus G15 has soldered 8 GB of RAM with only 1 available RAM slot for upgrade... this isn't viable... certainly not in 2020 where they shouldn't be soldering RAM in a 15" unit, least of all they should NOT solder only 8GB. In 2012 you could get away with that, but not in 2020.
Until OEM's come out with a laptop which has acceptable temperatures (UP TO 80 degrees C on both CPU and GPU when FULLY stressed) with not much noise, I'm not getting this.
I'd sooner opt to get the Acer Predator Helios 500 PH517-61 (if I can find it to buy in UK for an acceptable price).