My wife wants a new laptop for Christmas. All the ones that is the size and the price we want all are run by Intel Celeron processors.
My previous laptop had the i5 8250u CPU and an AMD video processor. But it had a poorly designed cooling system, severe thermal throttling would kick in any time it was given a challenging task such as video encoding. It would slow down to Celeron speeds within a minute or two.
My replacement laptop has a Ryzen 5 2500u and no discrete video processor... theoretically it should have been slightly slower than the i5 8250u even without the discrete video processor. But it outperformed the other computer by a significant margin on every benchmark that mattered to me.
Ryzen 5 2500u laptops typically did not have the greatest ratings when they first came out because the drivers were flakey to begin with. This caused the prices to drop and then when decent drivers were released they became real bargains because the Ryzen’s built in video processor is vastly superior to the one in the i5 8250u.
One should probably avoid any laptop with the seventh generation i5 7200u or the i7 7500u processors. The 8th generation series intel core series laptop processors were a huge improvement over their predecessors. The i5 8250u is significantly faster than the i7 7500u and nearly twice as fast as the i5 7200u.
Interestingly enough this doesn’t apply as much to the desktop processor core processors. The 6 year old Intel i7-3770 outperforms the i7 8550u, but it uses approximately 3 times as much power to do it.
Currently the Ryzen 5 based laptops are typically $100 to $200 cheaper than their i5 based counterparts.
My wife wants a new laptop for Christmas. All the ones that is the size and the price we want all are run by Intel Celeron processors.