So a little bit of a back story… Our company is gonna be doing a hardware refresh here soon. He and I are wanting to move over to Dell laptops from the Microsoft surfaces currently deploy for our baseline sku. We kind of like the Dell Pro Max 14 inch with the Intel core ultra 7 265H and 32 gigs of RAM. That got me thinking about the devices we deploy to our software developers. We deploy the 16” Precision 5680 with 64 gigs of ram and 13th Gen i9-13900H.
Is there actually that much of a performance uplift from the ultra 7 to the ultra 9. When building out the device on Dells website the 16 inch version of the laptop that has the available ultra 9 can’t even be speced up to 64 GB of RAM. And the ram that is available seems to be slightly slower than the 14 inch version has.
Our software developers are primarily web developers, using JavaScript and the other ones. generally use C#
i9 is a waste in most Dell chassis as they throttle before being useful. Stick with the most modern i7 system you can get.
Also the stock SSDs are dog slow often and some models have started to appear with soldered RAM eg. Latitude 7450 using Core Ultra 7 1xx.
Maybe the Framework laptops might be an interesting choice seeing how they are upgradable and highly configurable.
I’ve been wanting to convince management of framework laptops for a while. I don’t think I’ll be able to. Would anybody happen to have benchmarks pointing to the throttling issue?
I don’t have any benchmarks, as I only have the ultra 9 available in my work Dell. Agree it’s pointless - this thing can’t do anywhere near peak sustained load.
I don’t want to sound like an ass OP, but have you made any research on own before asking? Because this question answers itself pretty easily:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/compare.html?productIds=241750,241747
9 285 is just and higher bin with near double TDP, and not significantly higher binned that 7 265H. Its absolutely not worth paying extra if everything else is being equal.
Cooling performance of chassis will be decisive factor than the specific CPU here. It might even make upgrade from 13900H pointless. If not the case cooling is not extra specced for core 9, it might perform even worse than core 7.
One of many reasons why apple ditched intel in the end, just less extreme.
Get a sample unit and run your production benchmarks, it probably wont be anything wortth celebrating.
You can get baseline comparison here, just average across many models. Perf gains are minuscule.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Processors-Benchmark-List.2436.0.html
TLDR: On paper there is little to no reason to go for 9 285H over 7 265H. Cheaper i7 performs nearly identically at lower TDP. But since its mobile cpu, final OEM implementation will shape real word performance. Its pointless to compare chip alone, oem can fuck it up totally by cheap design.
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I have done the research. I’m just reaching out to ask about other people‘s experiences, and gaining as much data as I can before making a final decision. I’ll also have to convince quite a few people who only see that there’s a higher number and think it must be way better. I’ve scoured quite a few forums and looked at the comparison on various benchmarking websites along with Intel’s website. I should have a couple sample units coming in a week or two, so I’m formulating some tests that are in line with the workflow of various employees.
Aw crap, that kind of decisionmakers are the worst.
If you want to save time and headaches, replicate notebookchecks review process, they are generally the best in class notebook review site as it stands.
They dont review high end enterprise and workstation grade hardware often, so here is overpriced gaming model with 285H review for inspiration 
https://www.notebookcheck.net/A-slim-gaming-laptop-now-with-an-RTX-5090-and-64-GB-of-RAM-Asus-ROG-Zephyrus-G16-2025-review.993365.0.html
Most interesting observation would be monitoring real frenqency and TDP over time between with I9 vs I7.
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