Does a laptop with both the Core i7-1065G7 Iris Plus and GeForce MX250 make sense for gaming? We give our early thoughts

To prove this, we ran a few commonly played games on a Core i7-1065G7 laptop and then compared the average frame rates to that of a laptop with GeForce MX250 graphics. If those 3DMark scores above are accurate, then we should expect a 20 to 25 percent boost when jumping from the Core i7-1065G7 Iris Plus to the GeForce MX250. In reality, we're recording frame rate advantages as high as 50 percent to 70 percent in favor of the Nvidia GPU in games like Rocket League and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Other games like Bioshock Infinite or Overwatch are even more in favor of Nvidia.

Additional factors may also be responsible for the larger-than-expected real-world gaming performance gap between Iris Plus and the GeForce MX250. Firstly, GeForce GPUs are significantly better optimized for gaming than the Intel Iris series. Gaming on Iris graphics has always been a gamble in terms of compatibility and performance and this continues to be true on Ice Lake-U. Secondly, the GeForce GPU is less likely to be bottlenecked by the CPU since it has its own dedicated pool of VRAM and resources. It is able to utilize its full TDP envelope instead of only a portion of the 15 W or 25 W TDP for the Core i7-1065G7 Iris Plus.

For video editing or encoding purposes, the 15 W Core i7-1065G7 will be about the same as the Whiskey Lake-U Core i7-8565U. You'd have to upgrade to the more demanding 25 W version for an appreciable CPU speed boost of 25 to 30 percent.

Granted, our 3DMark and gaming benchmark results were done on pre-production Ice Lake-U units and so they do not fully represent any Ice Lake-U laptops currently on store shelves. Bottlenecks elsewhere like RAM were not accounted for during these tests. Nonetheless, we still expect to see similar patterns based on our experience with existing Intel Iris-powered PCs. We'll be revisiting the Core i7-1065G7 in the weeks ahead with consumer-ready laptops like the Dell XPS 13 7390 2-in-1, Razer Blade Stealth refresh, and HP Spectre to paint a bigger picture of how the Iris Plus compares to the GeForce MX250.