Question Fanless low end processor beating intel I7 playing youtube 1080p60

[fesanand]

I don’t know what else to change or update.
I have two laptops:
1 HP 8740W with an I7 840QM (3408 cpu benchmark)
GPU: Quadro FX3800
SSD (sata3 speed only motherboard, but faster than HDD)
RAM 8gb
CPU temperatures are in the 65 celsius
Original power brick 230W, the top one.

2 Low-end slim Asus E403S with a fanless N3700 processor (1832 cpu benchmark)
GPU: intel integrated motherboard
Integrated SSD
RAM 2gb
Both with same version of Chrome; flashplayer ,HP last version 32.0.0.144 ; different flashplayer in Asus 32.0.0.114); latest drivers installed in both devices (Nvidia graphics, motherboard, cpu); same version of windows 10(freshly installed this month in both devices); good wireless bandwith (grey bar downloading video always ahead of reproduction)

The Low-end asus can play the video (1080p60f) at a continuous 100% cpu load and is able to play the video not perfect but smoothly. Only Chrome-youtube alone is taking 80% of the load.

The HP, on the other hand, whenever the cpu reaches 60% (and above) load for Chrome-youtube (total of 80% to 90% cpu load) the videos become jerky, stutter, glitch, sound and image uncoordinated, freezing for 4 or 5 seconds. And it does all this several times in a 5 minute youtube video. I swear that in the past the HP could play 2K videos smoothly. It does the same in Firefox, and it does the same in Brave browser.
User benchmark-test says that processor and GPU are performing as expected (compared with the same hardware benchmarks by other users)

Any clue (?) Thanks.

 

[Solandri]

It sounds like you have the HP laptop set to decode YouTube video in hardware. That'll force it to use the GPU to render the video. Since the FX3800 is from 2009, it probably won't do a very good job of it since it doesn't know how to handle the newer codecs. Try going into your browser settings and disable hardware video acceleration. (The link is for enabling it, but the process is the same.) That'll force it to use your CPU to decode the video, something the i7-840QM is more than capable of.

https://www.lifewire.com/hardware-acceleration-in-chrome-4125122

Your Asus laptop's integrated GPU is from 2015, so it actually shouldn't be having problems with Youtube videos (the CPU shouldn't be hitting 100%). The integrated GPU is supposed to support 4k h.265 decode. So in the Asus laptop's case, you probably have hardware video acceleration disabled, and need to enable it in your browser.

You probably remember 1080p YouTube videos playing without problems in the past because Google changed the video encoding a couple years back. Newer videos are encoded with a newer codec, which your FX3800 probably doesn't know how to decode. So the library of YouTube videos is slowly being converted to the newer codec that your GPU cannot handle.

 

[fesanand]

Thanks for quick answer Solandri.
Hardware accel. was activated in both laptops.
Now has been disabled in the HP:
The result(HP) is better youtube reproduction, CPU load is lower: 40% most of the time ( I don't know why now is lower that depends more on cpu) but hits 60% several times having some freezes, but less frequently).
The overall result is Asus still playing 1080p60 smoothly and ahead, HP has still a jerky reproduction that makes unconfortable to watch the video despite becoming better than before.

(disabling hardware acceleration in the Asus affects negatively the video reproduction)

Any other solutions?

This I7 cannot be upgraded (I7-920XM would be an insignificant upgrade). In case I wanted to upgrade laptop, is H.265 compatible processor and gpu the key to have good 2k and 4k video reproduction?

 

[Solandri]

I believe YouTube actually uses VP9 not h.265, and they're planning to switch to AV1 in the future. But GPUs which support h.265 decode usually also support VP9. As h.265 wasn't standardized until 2013, no processor that works in your 2009 laptop will support it.

I was mistaken in assuming your i7 was a Westmere processor. It's actually an older Nehalem processor (barely better than Core 2). That may explain why it's not able to smoothly decode 1080p60 in software. If this were a desktop, the solution would be simple - buy a modern GPU. But since it's a laptop (and a 10 year old laptop at that), it may just be time to retire it and buy a new one.

If you want to keep it, you might just have to limit YouTube to playing videos in 720p. There should be extensions which will auto-select that as your max resolution. (Speaking of which, first try viewing YouTube in a Chrome incognito window. That will disable all your extensions by default. If it's an extension causing the stuttering, it should play smoothly in incognito mode.)

If you're going to replace it, pretty much everything made since about 2017 supports h.265 and VP9 decode in hardware. Most of them are even able to do it up to 4k resolution.

 

[fesanand]

Is underwhelming to have a lovely ips 17" dreamcolor display and not being able to enjoy it at it's fhd resolution (I don't download media).

Thanks very much for you complete and clarifying reply, I'll follow your advice.
I'll study the options to upgrade gpu ( detachable in 8740w) but probably I'll have to upgrade laptop.