Why is there not much difference in performance between my new and old laptop?

[TrueBlueDove]

I recently bought a new Legion 5i Pro laptop for editing, but despite the very huge difference in price, there is not much difference in performance compared to my old Dell Latitude E7450 laptop. For everyday tasks like browsing the web and watching videos, there is no noticeable difference. Even when it comes to rendering and editing 1080p or 4K videos using DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere Pro, the rendering time difference is only a few seconds.

Bootup, copying large files, compressing, browsing, or watching videos - there is not much noticeable difference. I’m curious to know why this is the case and if anyone else has experienced this.

Here are the specs of my new laptop:

Legion 5i Pro

• 12th Gen i9-12900H processor
• RTX 3070 Ti 8GB GDDR6 graphics card
• 32GB 4800MHz DDR5 RAM
• 2TB SSD
• Windows 11 operating system

And here are the specs of my old laptop:

• Dell Latitude E7450
• 5th Gen i7-5600U processor
• Nvidia geforce 840m
• 16GB 1600MHz DDR3L RAM
• 512GB SSD
• Windows 10 Pro

Any insights would be appreciated!

 

[pctech2005]

check for any software installed by the manufacturer such as McAfee that could be slowing down your device.

 

[hotaru.hino]

For browsing the web, the web has been optimized to the point where basic smartphones can run them just fine. This is on top of the fact that the internet is likely the slowest thing on your computer, i.e., the computer is waiting on the internet more often than not.

For viewing videos, I'm presuming you mean from the internet, it's the same story. Streaming sites only download around 30 seconds at most ahead of where you are and if you're flipping around through the video, again, the internet is slow and your computer is waiting on it. If it's locally played videos... if your computer can't playback say 1080p 60 FPS video, something is terribly wrong.

 

[PassMark]

The i9-12900H can use 100W+ at full load. Video card might be another 100W+
This is a huge amount of heat for a laptop to dump. Maybe too much? Maybe the whole thing is thermally throttled.

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

Three main things could be bottlenecking you.
#1. Power mode:
The operating system could be currently set to a more power saving mode rather than higher performance mode. This is usually the case with laptops, and is especially the case when it's not plugged in and running on battery.

#2. Bloatware/Telemetry:
Pretty much any prebuilt system out of the box has so much crap going on in the background with bloatware and telemetry it sucks back and uses up important resources that could otherwise be used for things like your video exports, if you feel so inclined, you can attempt to clean it up or just install a clean install just to get rid of at least the bloatware (the telemetry can be handled with a couple of scripts you can find from guys like Chris Titus).

#3. Thermal throttling:
As mentioned, it could also be thermal throttling due to excessive heat output. Make sure it is kept on a flat surface so that the little nubs for feet can elevate it enough to get some air, but if you can get it more elevated to get more air great. Don't put it on top of any cloth, and try to be in a more well ventilated environment, if it's hot in your room that won't help the laptop to stay cool.

 

[ttheobald]

For the workloads you describe...

"Bootup, copying large files, compressing, browsing, or watching videos|"

...none of these are a strain on your graphics card, your CPU, or RAM, and I'd be willing to bet a ten year old system would perform almost identically to a modern one. Particularly file copying, your bottleneck is going to be your ethernet cable. Even an old laptop spinner drive is still probably SATA III, which is 6x the rated speed of a 1Gb ethernet port. If you're talking about copying internally, then you'll need to find a file that's big enough to be noticeable between the drive types in the two systems (and if the older one is an SSD, it'll need to be a BIG file, like multiple Gb). Doing copies of many little files introduces an IO load that is more chipset-dependent, and although there will be some differences, they won't be as dramatic as when you do a big-file copy.

Compression could demonstrate some difference between your CPU models, but to get to a noticeable level you'd have to be compressing several gigabytes of data. If you have access to some particularly large XML files you could give that a shot, stuffing them into an archive with 7zip or something.

One thing you could do as a test, try using MakeMKV on a DVD or Blu-Ray, and then convert it to MP4 using handbrake. Compare the two doing that and I'd bet five bucks you'll see a marked difference.

I just upgraded at the end of last year from a I7-5820k to an I9-13900, and same thing here, none of the regular everyday activities changed. But hoboy, my compile times, 3D slicing and rendering, etc., threaded data chugging, through the roof.

Hope this helps -

T

 

[TrueBlueDove]

Thank you to everyone who tried to help. I completely agree with @ttheobald's points.

Over the past two days, I conducted several benchmark tests, including Cinebench, PCMark, CrystalDiskMark, and 3DMark. I also tested renders in Blender, DaVinci Resolve, and Premiere Pro. Additionally, I tried a few free Steam games, although gaming is not my main focus.

The benchmark results revealed a significant difference in both single-core and multi-core performance. The new Lenovo laptop performed exceptionally well in all the tests, even when rendering the Blender BMW demo file.

However, when it came to editing/rendering 6K BRAW footage, I was expecting smoother performance. Especially after color grading, adding effects, and compositing. I set the project previews to "smart" and the lowest quality to "quarter," but I still needed to create proxies and optimize media for smooth 6K playback during editing.

Sometimes, it was so difficult to handle 6K raw footage that I had to go back to 4K, which defeated the purpose of buying a new laptop.

Regarding gaming, the contrast between the old Dell and the newer Lenovo is remarkable. The performance improvement is undeniable, although gaming is not my primary use case due to time constraints.

In all honesty, I realize that my expectations were somewhat unrealistic. While there are significant differences on paper, such as 2 cores vs. 14 cores, 1600MHz DDR3 vs. 4800MHz DDR5, and 840M vs. RTX 3070 Ti, I was hoping for a monumental leap in workflow and performance.

Perhaps in my mind, I envisioned the upgrade from an old Toyota Corolla to a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport, but in reality, it didn't significantly enhance my actual workflow. I now understand that technology and performance improvements don't always translate into such dramatic differences. It's crucial to consider how specific tasks and applications utilize these advancements to fully appreciate their impact.

Thank you again for your help.