Till now, all the reviews of Intel’s Tiger Lake notebook processors were from the reference device sent by Team Blue to a select few reviewers. Although the performance was quite dismal at the 15W TDP standard, many reviewers stated that the performance would vary from OEM to OEM, depending on the build and chassis. Today, we have the first review of a non-reference Tiger Lake notebook in the form of the Zenbook 14, thanks to NBC.
The conclusion of this review is basically that in multi-threaded workloads, AMD’s Ryzen 4000 (Renoir) notebooks still have a sizeable lead over Intel’s latest offering, with Tiger Lake being slightly faster in lightly threaded workloads such as excel and word processing. In everything else from rendering to video editing, encoding, compression/decompression as well as all of PCMark’s tests. Then there, the matter of gaming. Intel was quite vocal about its Gen12 Xe graphics, but for some reason, the ASUS Zenbook 14 powered by Xe falls short by a notable margin in each an every gaming benchmark:
Final Fantasy XV is the only game where the Core i7-1187G7 comes out on top by a hair’s margin, whereas the Renoir based Ryzen 4700U is faster in every other game by around 15%. Whether this is the result of poor drivers or overmarketing isn’t quite clear at the moment. Regardless, it looks like Tiger Lake won’t be the win that Intel so desperately needed in the mobile segment:
