I recently broke out an old, half-dead laptop to see if I could resuscitate it. It’s a 4 or 5 year old Dell Inspiron 7567 with an i5-7300hq.
I have a question that’s highly subjective, and may offend a few AMD fans, but I’m curious if anyone else has had this impression. Even though my two AMD desktops (Ryzen 7 1700 & 3700X) have much more processing and graphical power (Vega 56 & 2070 Super respectively) than this old laptop, it feels more responsive. I know that is highly subjective, and I’d be hard pressed to back it up with any objective evidence. But it just seems to respond instantly to input, where with the AMD systems there seems to be an ever so slight delay in reaction.
Am I hallucinating? An Intel fanboy? Don’t get me wrong; those AMD systems boast much more impressive graphical fidelity than this old clunker, but it just seems snappier.
windows desktop responsiveness is down to the settings used for starting up and shutting down apps. likely its set a bit quicker by default on the laptop.
snappiness can also be affected by ram latency.
the lappy may have ddr3 that is actually faster responding over all due to its lower latency to mt/s ratio.
ddr4 3200 cas 16 for instance will return a first word in 10 ns.
but ddr3 1333 at cas latency 6 will return a first word in 9 ns. effectively 10% quicker.
this little difference can show up big on the desktop as far as perceived snappiness.
then theres the lappy screen. is it running at faster Hz than your desktop monitor?. if so that to can also affect perceived snappiness, just by the fact your seeing +N more frames per second.
with your ryzen i would look at both windows response times and cas latency of the ram in eufi and tighten both and see if that changes your perception.
The laptop has DDR4-2400, while the Ryzen 3700X has DDR4-3200. Not sure of the CAS latencies on either system. I have overclocked the laptop screen to 90Hz, but the 3700X is connected to a 144Hz monitor. But even when both systems are running a game < 60 fps the Kaby Lake laptop still feels more responsive.
Maybe perception plays a bigger role than you think. Your expectations of an old laptop wouldn’t be as great as the newer more powerful and more expensive desktop. It is difficult to get a true apples to apples comparison between 2 completely different platforms.
Which OS on them all, and are the amd chipset drivers from their website installed (on Ryzen 2700x I observed a 10% performance difference vs whatever windows 10 defaults with)
Haven’t had experience with intel 7000 series but my 6700 at work feels roughly same as my 2700x. Maybe an edge to the 2700x.
I suspect the intel will be more responsive when both are idle due to single compute node arch and the amd will be more responsive under load due to bigger caches and more cores.
A fresh install always feels snappier than an old one, and this is especially true for Windows.
Another thing is that you could be looking at this “old half dead” laptop and expecting it to feel slow, but then once it’s all set up, it bests your expectations so you’re only measuring difference in expectation vs reality.