These are the best and worst Intel Core i7 Ice Lake laptops of 2019

Despite its turbulent development history, Intel managed to push out the 10 nm Ice Lake series of ULV processors before year's end. Actual Ultrabooks sporting the fancy new CPUs, however, have been limited to just a small handful. We've tested six different laptops all with the Core i7-1065G7 CPU to see which of these early Ice Lake units you should consider as well which ones you should avoid from a pure performance point-of-view.

The current top two laptops that represent Ice lake at its best are the Dell XPS 13 7390 2-in-1 and 15-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop 3. As shown by our benchmarks below, the Core i7 in the Dell convertible benefits from faster Turbo Boost than every other Ice Lake laptop even though the advantage is temporary. Clock rates eventually fall and stabilize at 3.0 GHz with a very warm CPU temperature of 97 C. The Microsoft laptop is able to outperform the Dell by 8 percent over longer periods according to CineBench R15 Multi-Thread and at a much lower running temperature of 77 C.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the bottom two performers: the Razer Blade Stealth GTX 1650 Max-Q and the HP Spectre x360 13. In Razer's defense, the Blade Stealth GTX 1650 Max-Q uses the 15 W version of the Core i7-1065G7 instead of the more powerful 25 W version and overall CPU performance is on par with Intel's 15 W control laptop. The Blade Stealth Ice Lake SKU without the GeForce GPU uses the "proper" 25 W version and performance is thus much closer to the Dell and Microsoft systems mentioned above.

The HP system trails behind all other Core i7 Ice Lake laptops at the moment because of its cycling clock rates when under stress. Whereas the Dell laptop stabilizes at 3 GHz when running Prime95, the HP laptop would cycle between 1.6 GHz and 2.2 GHz. Frame rates when gaming on the HP would cycle as well for an inconsistent experience. Power consumption is lower and battery life is longer on the HP, but you'll be sacrificing performance along the way.

More Ice Lake laptops are expected to be available in 2020 including the refreshed LG Gram and we've excluded those we have yet to test such as the Surface Pro 2019. However, this should still give a good idea of which laptops to consider if you happen to be in the market for an Intel 10th gen CPU.

Buy Spectre x360 13 now on Amazon
Buy XPS 13 7390 2-in1 now on Amazon
Buy Surface Laptop 3 15-inch now on Amazon