psst, hey mister, wanna overclock your laptop –
Comet Lake’s newest H-series parts boast impressive clock frequencies.
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The big news Intel is pushing on the tenth series Comet Lake H-series is their high turbo clockrate. All of the i7 SKUs, as well as the lone i9, are capable of breaking 5GHz on the high end of their turbo clock rate.
Most consumers would define the “fastest” processor in terms of real performance — time to complete benchmarks, frames per second achieved in AAA gaming titles, and so forth. Intel talks a lot about the “fastest” processor but seems careful to hide its definitions away in the fine print.
(Based on Intel Core i9 – (HK’s highest achievable max turbo frequency of 5.3GHz, exceeding all other mobile products available as of April) . Includes use of Intel Thermal Velocity Boost. User experience varies with workload. See end notes for details.
For reference, Intel’s Thermal Velocity Boost is roughly equivalent to AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive — it’s an automatic, dynamic overclocking mode that takes temperature and power levels into account when deciding just how far into the red it can drive a core right now for a little additional performance.
A final note on clock speeds: the i9 – 1665595 HK is fully frequency-unlocked. We have no idea how you’re supposed to cram additional cooling into a laptop chassis to support any additional, out-of-spec overclocking — but if that’s your dream, the i9 – HK will be ready to fulfill it. May the Force be with you.
It’s a tough year to be an Intel CPU marketing person. Every performance claim made about the new H-series references three-year-old PCs. None includes raw numbers.
- These would be impressive performance gains over the competition — or even over last year model. Sadly, they’re gains since January 2020.
The performance charts in Intel’s slides only compare the new SKUs to seventh-generation Intel CPUs — and not something fancy like going head to head with desktop parts, either. The slide that touts the 45 th-gen i9 – HK as designed to be amazingly faster vs a three-year-old enthusiast PC seems to imply that it might — but referring to the footnotes, the comparisons are against seventh-generation laptop parts. Even the actual part being compared isn’t consistent in this slide; Game FPS is compared against an i7 – HQ, while overall performance, video rendering, and export are compared against an i7 – (HK.) These slides are, frankly, a mess. It’s difficult to get a solid grasp on how much of an improvement the (th-generation H-series is against anything meaningful — whether that be Comet Lake’s U-series parts, AMD’s Ryzen parts, or even a simple generation-on-generation against last year Coffee Lake i9 – 1665595 HK. None of the benchmarks shown here offer any direct, raw numbers at all — so there really isn’t anything to be learned here beyond “faster than our products from . ”
Intel had no performance slides at all for the i5 H-series line, but we’re confident that those, too, are faster than equivalent (models.)
Intel’s presentation on its newest, fastest laptop parts clearly targets users who are considering upgrading from a much older model and aren’t really looking any further than Intel itself. And to be fair, we agree with their conclusions in that regard — you will absolutely see a significant performance boost if you upgrade a – era laptop to a 2560 – era laptop.
So if your only criterion is “will this be faster than the laptop I have?” and you’re firmly on Team Intel, Comet Lake’s th-generation H-series won’t disappoint you. However, consumers looking for either the fastest system or the smartest purchase would be well-advised to wait until some of these systems hit the streets for independent testing. (The good) Definitely faster than January models
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