Laptop

Normally, you would expect a newer laptop being faster than its older predecessor. Sometimes however, this isn't the case. Unfortunately, the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 2019, which we are reviewing right now, is slower than the older model.

Comet Lake-U is the successor to the current Whiskey Lake-U CPUs from Intel. However, the new models are still manufactured in the familiar 14nm process. We checked the performance of the new Core i7 with a pre-production unit, but the results are rather sobering.

The new 10th gen Comet Lake U and Y-series processors succeed Whiskey Lake and will co-exist alongside the 10nm Ice Lake SKUs. Comet Lake continues to build upon the well-refined 14nm process and aims to offer the first 6-core and 12-thread ULV package (Core i7-10710U), increased boost clocks, better sustained performance, and improved battery life. While Intel claims a fairly significant performance gain from the previous generation, our preliminary benchmarks show that may not really be the case.

Because of the way OLED works, it may be worth changing white backgrounds to something darker especially if your commonly used applications or web pages are predominately white. At the most extreme, white at maximum brightness will consume almost 14 W more than if the screen were only black.

Cool as a cucumber. Designing and implementing an efficient thermal system in a laptop requires a lot of R&D and proper selection of each individual component in the system to ensure all components perform to their full potential. In this basics article, we take a look at what goes into each step of the thermal design process and how OEMs test and prototype their thermal designs for maximum efficiency. We take the example of MSI's flagship GT76 laptop that can run unhindered on 5 GHz on all cores to better illustrate the process. (sponsored article)