Being honest, I really dislike HP laptops. I've had quite a few of them come across my workbench for design flaws that ultimately caused their demise. Very poor thermal management on many of them, to the point that they'll actually cook themselves to death. Making matters worse is Win11's dodgy Standby mode which will cause them to turn on when inside a bag and REALLY cook themselves.
Originally Posted by
Fliar
I'm looking at getting a Carbon X1 and am debating between a gen 11 or a gen 12. The difference is a whopping US$650. The main differences are that the Gen 12 would have 32GB vs 16GB and the latest i7 versus the i7-1355U.
The most taxing thing I do on the computer is live streaming using OBS.
So my questions are:
1) Would you recommend the Gen 11 or the Gen 12
2) If I do go with the Gen 11 would you recommend the i7 or the i5? The latter shaves another $200 off the price.
I'd take 32GB RAM in anything over 16GB, even if it is more modern. Case in point: Most of my users are still happily running Lenovo T510/T540p from 10-14 years ago. All have been upgraded to 16GB RAM, and modern SATA SSDs. The Passmark scores for their CPUs are 1899 and 6121, respectively. Everyone's running 2-3 screens. I'm currently using an Asus Zenbook, 13083 Passmark score, only 8GB RAM, and I'd rather have the 10 year old T540p.
I5 vs I7 isn't a clear cut choice. Some I5 will outperform I7. I'm working on getting myself a new laptop so I just threw together a quick chart of the processors available in the X1 Gen11 and Gen12. Sometimes older chips can outperform newer ones too. IIRC that was the case with the Gen 10 vs. Gen 11. I post single thread speeds as well because some applications ::cough::Adobe Acrobat and Quickbooks::cough:: still are single-threaded, so faster multi-core processors won't improve their performance at all.
Historically, for my office we buy usually 1 notch below the highest possible CPU, as that's where a major price break is.
The Intel Arc is a substantial upgrade over the Iris Xe in terms of performance. OBS doesn't like the AMD/Nvidia graphics card on my AMD-based Zenbook and refuses to load so I can't give a good estimate of what it needs. I will say, the Zenbook's aluminum case is nice, but the stability of a true enterprise-grade laptop, like Lenovo's ThinkPads or Dell's Latitudes, makes all the difference. Much more stable, and fewer problems.