I had a feeling that my new HP laptop was not giving full performance, especially in multi-core applications. To check whether my feeling was correct, I ran several benchmarks, Cinebench R23 and Geekbench 6. I also ran these on my older HP Omen 15 and my desktop PC. Here are the results:
Homebuilt desktop, Intel Core i5-9600K, Nvidia RTX 2070
Cinebench R23 single core: 1144
Cinebench R23 multi core: 6221
Geekbench 6 single core: 1532
Geekbench 6 multi core: 5711
Geekbench 6 OpenCL: 94696
HP Omen 15, Intel Core i7-10750H, Nvidia RTX 2060 Mobile
Cinebench R23 single core: 1204
Cinebench R23 multi core: 5827
Geekbench 6 single core: 1537
Geekbench 6 multi core: 6332
Geekbench 6 OpenCL: 71535
Quite interesting to see that the non-hyperthreading hexa-core i5 and the hyperthreading (i.e. 12 thread) hexa-core mobile i7 are very close in performance.
HP ZBook Power G9, Intel Core i7-12700H, Nvidia RTX A1000
Cinebench R23 single core: 1790
Cinebench R23 multi core: 8599
Geekbench 6 single core: 2324
Geekbench 6 multi core: 12286
Geekbench 6 OpenCL: 48557
These results were a real disappointment, especially the multi core results. I’ve seen Cinebench results of this processor with multi core results above 15,000 points. I quickly suspected that the CPU was being throttled. Unfortunately HP offers absolutely no options to set power limits, but with Throttlestop I could see that the CPU was limited to 25W, and could up the power limit.
It’s obvious that the Nvidia A1000, despite being based on the RTX 30 generation, is not made for gaming with its relatively low OpenCL result, about half that of the RTX 2070 in my desktop. VRAM is also limited to just 4 GB.
45W Power Limit
Cinebench R23 single core: 1764
Cinebench R23 multi core: 12998
Geekbench 6 single core: 2322
Geekbench 6 multi core: 12357
Geekbench 6 OpenCL: 47873
At 45W, the Cinebench R23 multi core score increased by almost 50%. For some strange reason, Geekbench 6 stayed at the lower power – Geekbench 5.4.5 scaled up, but those numbers aren’t presented here.
85W Power Limit
Cinebench R23 single core: 1780
Cinebench R23 multi core: 15463
I did a final test at 85W, and here I was able to match the multi core score of other laptops with the same CPU. Actual power use appeared to top off at around 60W due to thermal throttling. The increase with regard to the 45W setting is quite low, so I decided to stick to 45W for daily use. Even here the single core performance is 50% more than with the other two computer, and doubles in multi core use – a testament to the power of Intel’s 12th generation CPUs with their hybrid architecture.
This test shows that it can make sense to run benchmarks on a new computer and compare them to published results. Tools like HWINFO and Throttlestop can then help in monitoring CPU power and temperature, and possibly deal with throttling
