Lenovo laptops with the Ryzen 7 3700U run 58 percent faster than HP laptops with the exact same processor

The Zen+ Ryzen 7 3700U is designed to be a minor stopgap before the more significant Zen 2 series for laptops. Thus, performance is only marginally better than the Zen Ryzen 7 2700U much like how the Intel Whiskey Lake-U Core i7-8565U is only marginally better than the Kaby Lake-R Core i7-8550U. To AMD, however, this is perhaps "good enough" as the Ryzen 7 3700U is able to trade blows with the Core i7-8565U quite well in most scenarios.

The key word here is "most" because some laptops with the Ryzen 7 3700U run much slower than others even when they are all equipped with the same AMD CPU. Having reviewed four different Ryzen 7 3700U laptops thus far, we've discovered that the HP 14 and HP Envy x360 13 run significantly slower than the Lenovo ThinkPad E595 and Lenovo IdeaPad S540. While small differences in performance are expected between OEMs, the differences here are much wider than anticipated at almost 60 percent after accounting for throttling when jumping from the HP 14 to the ThinkPad E595. Our CineBench R15 loop test below illustrates this gap very clearly.

Looking closely at the core clock rates of the HP 14 and ThinkPad E595 reveals the cause of the enormous discrepancy. When stressing the HP with Prime95 and FurMark, clock rates would throttle to the 0.6 GHz to 1.4 GHz range compared to a steady 2.8 GHz on the Lenovo under similar conditions. Lenovo's implementation of the same AMD CPU is far superior at maintaining decent clock rates than both HP systems.

It's important to keep in mind that our comparison is only limited to two HP laptops and two Lenovo laptops. Pricier HP laptops with the Ryzen 7 3700U like the EliteBook 735 G6 may fare better than the relatively inexpensive HP 14 or Envy x360 13. Nonetheless, HP isn't doing itself any favors by debuting the Ryzen 7 3700U so poorly on its own devices when we know that AMD's latest processor is capable of much more.

See our reviews on the AMD-powered HP 14, HP Envy x360 13, and Lenovo IdeaPad S540 for more details. Our review on the ThinkPad E595 will be coming soon.