The most powerful 15" laptop is Lenovo ThinkPad P53. It has Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000 graphics card. Maximum resolution of external monitor is 5K@60Hz. The most powerful 17" laptops are Dell Precision 17 7730 and HP ZBook 17 G5. Both laptops have Nvidia Quadro P5200 graphics card. Maximum resolution of external monitor connected to Dell Precision 17 7730 is 8K@60Hz. Maximum resolution of external monitor connected to HP ZBook 17 G5 is 5K@60Hz.
North Carolina Department of Information Technology lists the following laptops as the most powerful: Dell Mobile Precision 7680, HP Zbook Fury 16 G10, Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 2. source: https://it.nc.gov/documents/it-volume-purchase-award/open
Vapor chamber cooling is more efficient than water cooling, as it can transfer more heat per unit of area. Greater efficiency enables vapor chamber cooling laptops to keep their components cooler, even under heavy load… Another benefit of vapor chamber cooling laptops is that they are much quieter than their air-cooled counterparts because the closed-loop liquid cooling system doesn’t require any fans to operate… You can expect to pay anywhere from $100 to $300 more for a vapor chamber cooling laptop than for a traditional air-cooled model. source: https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-a-vapor-chamber-cooling-laptop/
Dell Mobile Precision 7680 review: Battery life is really short. We are talking about three hours of very light use… We noticed some throttling in long loads, which is not good, considering the nature of this laptop… The bottom panel of the device reaches temperatures of about 54°C, which is hot, to say the least. Even on idle, the machine can become pretty warm. source: https://laptopmedia.com/review/dell-precision-16-7680-review-overheating-and-underdelivering-on-battery-life/p8/
I purchased ThinkPad P16 Gen 2 laptop a few days ago because my old laptop was ten years old. The new laptop has good cooling system including heat pipes (a.k.a. vapor chambers). I have chosen the ThinkPad because Dell Mobile Precision 7680 and HP Zbook Fury 16 G10 overheat and throttle. (HP tech support is bad.) There was no professional review of the ThinkPad, but its users did not complain about its cooling system, so I got the ThinkPad and tested it. There is no free testing software that can provide all important info, so I spent $35 on professional testing software called 3DMark. The 3DMark emulates video games. It recommended test called Time Spy for my old laptop and my new laptop. Detailed test results are shown in the following pictures. You can download 3DMark from: 3DMark benchmark for Windows, Android and iOS
My opinion about my ThinkPad laptops: My old laptop looks like it was made in the Soviet Union, but it has big, useful pocket called Ultrabay Slim. When I ran out of disk space (512GB SSD), I put big disk (2TB SSD) in the pocket. My new laptop is heavier and less pretty than the Dell laptop, but it is more suitable for hard work. As you can see in the tests, its CPU throttled for about 10s in a test which lasted about 380s - good enough. When the new ThinkPad was struggling with the hardest part of the test, it was blowing as much hot air as small hair dryer. Its fan was spinning fast, but it was surprisingly quiet. Its noise resembled heavy rain. I like my new ThinkPad, but I hate its operating system - Windows 11. I REALLY HATE IT!!!
I have three complaints about the new laptop: its motherboard failed, its battery was not charging due to obsolete BIOS, and letters on its keyboard are almost invisible. The letters are thin and white. The keys have similar color - gray. (Warranty fixed first two problems.)
Geekbench may be the best free testing program. You can download it from: Geekbench 6 Editions
HWiNFO64 is free program posted on: https://www.hwinfo.com/
It provides very detailed info about CPU, GPU, and RAM. If they overheat, the HWiNFO64 will tell you about it. It also displays summary info shown in the following screenshot.
Performance of Apple M3 Pro CPU is between the performance of Intel Core i9-14900KS and Intel Core i9-13900H. The M3 is less powerful than the 14900KS, but more powerful than the 13900H. The M3 is used in desktops and laptops. The 14900KS is used in desktops. The 13900H is used in laptops.
The efficiency scores make it clear that Intel CPU consumes 2.19 times more power and makes 2.19 times more heat than equally powerful Apple CPU. This advantage means that Apple laptops may become twice as fast as PC laptops when they match advanced cooling systems (heat pipes = vapor chambers) of best PC laptops. At present best Apple laptops have slightly faster CPUs than best PC laptops. I could find not any info about graphics performance of latest Apple laptops, but I remember that in the past several years Apple graphics performance lagged far behind Nvidia performance. It is almost certain that, with the help of Nvidia RTX 5000 Ada GPU, PC laptop can beat graphics performance of best Apple laptop.
It will be interesting to see what will be the case by Zen 5 and Lunar Lake mobile CPUs.
Meteor Lake hasn’t been all that great so far, with mostly improvement in GPU rather than CPU. But it does seem more efficient compared to Raptor Lake.
I think a far more interesting prospect again, will be if Microsoft make a custom Windows CPU. While it is quite fashionable to beat Intel over the head with efficiency arguments, they are highly generalised and stable CPUs, along with thier AMD counterparts (which are excellent right now).
Having a Microsoft-developed CPU would be very interesting after a couple of generations, as they can strip all of the generalities out of the chip, which is what Apple does for thier custom Arm chips. I think this may be a more theoretically “spiritually” relevant comparison. It also pits Intel directly against TSMC in node development in almost mirror scenarios.
I think the blender GPU render benchmark is also useful to get a feel for the GPU power of different systems. Although the NVIDIA renderer might be more optimized since it has existed for a longer time.
M3 Max scores pretty well for its form factor and its power consumption.
just my impression; put another way, I have had it 3 months and have not yet bothered to move my daily work to it from the m1 mini; will have do so when I have to travel
