I wish that I had seen this thread last week. I bought a laptop a couple months ago with a Ryzen 5 2500u processor. I was having difficulty with the HP drivers and the touchpad driver in particular, so I ordered a laptop with an 8th generation 8250u i5 and an nvidia video processor. By the time the second laptop was delivered, I had the problems with the Ryzen laptop worked out.
So I ran a bunch of benchmarks and the Ryzen laptop was far more powerful than the i5 even with the discrete video processor. This was largely because the i5 and nvidia produced so much less heat that it was thermal throttling down to a pathetic pace when trying to do demanding tasks. I am a big believer in the Ryzen family of processors at this point. These know-it-alls who claim that the i3 beats the Ryzen 5 have no clue.
Yes, the Ryzen has received good reviews for a reason, but your configurations are comparable. At press time, the Envy x360 with Ryzen 5 was $100 less than the unit with Intel inside. The difference in performance between these chips is really small for most users, and for AMD, that's a huge win. https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/amd-ryzen-mobile-vs-intel-8th-gen-core.
Sorry for your experience with the i5. But I think you meant "the i5 and nvidia produced so much less more heat that it was thermal throttling down." But you should be able to configure it not to do so (except in extreme heat) in the BIOS plus power config. in Windows.
These know-it-alls who claim that the i3 beats the Ryzen 5 have no clue.
Note though that there are many iterations of the i3, while i think the the claim was that the i3 beats the Ryzen 3200g for the same price, and which simply is not the case. Video cards can cost more than the $100 AMD Ryzen 3 3200G 4-Core Unlocked Desktop Processor. Thank God we can even get such tools (not for wasting time on gaming though).
bttt