First Core i7-1185G7 benchmarks just barely outperform the Core i7-1165G7, if at all

Ultrabooks with 10th gen Core i7 Ice Lake would typically come with the Core i7-1065G7 only. For the current 11th gen Core i7 Tiger Lake series, however, some OEMs are offering two options instead: the Core i7-1165G7 or the slightly more expensive Core i7-1185G7. We've tested a couple of Core i7-1185G7 laptops thus far and our numbers don't paint a compelling picture for the new top-end CPU.

Our graphs below compare the MSI Prestige 14 Evo and Dell XPS 13 9310, each with the Core i7-1185G7 CPU, to the average scores of all Core i7-1165G7 laptops in our database as of this writing to show how marginal the gains can be between the Core i7-1165G7 and i7-1185G7. The differences can be so minor that a few Core i7-1165G7 laptops like the Razer Book 13 can edge out the i7-1185G7 even though it comes equipped with the "slower" i7-1165G7 processor. The Prestige 14 Evo can offer about 15 percent faster raw multi-thread performance than the average Core i7-1165G7.

As for their integrated Iris Xe GPUs, the Core i7-1165G7 and i7-1185G7 each come with 96 EUs and so any performance differences between them are again marginal with a 15 percent advantage for the i7-1185G7 according to 3DMark.

It's possible that the Core i7-1185G7 may extend its lead over the i7-1165G7 once we receive more test samples for a larger sample size, but the somewhat underperforming Dell XPS 13 9310 i7-1185G7 configuration isn't getting our hopes up.