■ Ryzen 5 vs i5 laptop
➤ Following Intel’s pay-per-view on desktops last year, AMD announced Ryzen laptop processors, promising to run laptops on a single chipset by early 2018. Acer was one of the first companies to introduce these new chips into existing chipsets. A series of new laptops powered by Acer has finally arrived in India. We take a look at the new Acer Swift 3 laptop, which is powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 2500U processor. This quad-core, eight-wire chip now competes directly with Acer’s eighth-generation Intel Core i5 laptop, which we reviewed recently. Can the Red Team finally work on the laptop front? We got it.
■Here is the test of RYZEN 5 VS i5 LAPTOPS
#1. Performance test
➤ The reason CPU performance isn’t comparable across the laptop category is that it’s often difficult to get your hands on a single particular laptop powered by AMD chips. Even for this test, the two units we test are not the same, but very similar. The mighty Ryzen 5 machine is the 15.6-inch Acer Swift 3, paired with 8GB of RAM and a 1TB HDD. By comparison, the Acer Swift 3 with an Intel Core i5-8250U processor has a 14-inch screen, 4GB of RAM, and 256GB of SSD storage. Both devices have the same metal body and come equipped with a 1080p display.
➤ Although screen size shouldn’t be an issue here as both laptops have the same resolution, there may be a slight difference in performance due to slower hard drives in AMD systems. However, the Ryzen 5 laptop is currently priced at Rs. 42,990 and the Intel-powered system comes for Rs. 59,999. Although the laptops used in testing are good machines in terms of price, we’re more interested in comparing both CPUs.
➤ As you can see, both processors have four main components, each with eight single wires. Both come with integrated graphics, but AMD has the upper hand here as the company has a long history of making better-integrated GPUs than its Intel counterparts. Similarly, the integrated Radeon Vega GPU is expected to outperform the Intel UHD 620 GPU.
#2.The CPU performance test
➤ To narrow down the performance gap between the two machines, we ran two popular synthetic benchmarks—the Cinebench R15 and PCMark 8 Creative Accelerated benchmarks. While Cinebench is a test that focuses more on performance, PCMark 8 is a complete test with many sub-tests.
➤ Test results like Cinebench R15 are almost identical between two mobile devices. The test measures general performance by looking at a 3D scene. Here, AMD beats Intel by a slight margin with a CPU score of 568, which ends at 524 points.
➤ PCMark 8 Creative Accelerated Benchmark: PCMark 8 is another very popular structural performance benchmark that we ran on both devices. A laptop powered by AMD receives an impressive 500 points in this category. This standard creates many challenging computer tasks and is typically designed to test medium and high-end laptop computers.
#3.Graphic test
➤As far as graphics are concerned, 3DMark is a really good test to fill in the performance gap between the integrated GPUs. We conducted fire tests on both devices, as well as skydive testing.
#4.Gaming Test
➤ We can’t play multiple games on both laptops at the same time, but we could run Sniper Elite benchmarks on both laptops. The Radeon Vega GPU enabled the Ryzen laptop to achieve an average of 17.55 fps and the Intel-powered machine, the UHD 620, with an average of 14.45 fps.
#5.Real-world test
➤ All that being said and done, in the real world, usage matters, and here the two machines are very different from each other. We opened multiple tabs in Chrome on both devices, turned off video and audio, and even tried some video conversions, and both mobile devices were successful with everything with flying colors. There is some delay in the AMD-powered Acer Swift 3, but that’s more due to the slower hard drive than the processor. Overall, both processors are capable of handling day-to-day tasks equally.
➤ The best part is that we have not experienced any general heat issues with this AMD Ryzen-powered device. Both the Acer Swift 3 laptops registered the same outdoor temperature but kept the temperature below 40 degrees Celsius. Both laptops do get a bit hot, but they are unusually uncomfortable.