AMD’s Mobile Revival: Redefining the Notebook Business with the Ryzen 9 4900HS (A Review)
by Dr. Ian Cutress on April 9, 2020 9:00 AM ESTTesting the Ryzen 9 4900HS Integrated Graphics
Under the hood of the Ryzen 9 4900HS, aside from the eight Zen 2 cores, is an enhanced Vega 8 graphics solution. For this generation of mobile processors, AMD is keeping the top number of compute units to 8, whereas in the previous generation it went up to Vega 11. Just by the name, one would assume that AMD has lowered the performance of the integrated graphics. This is not the case.
For the new Ryzen Mobile 4000 processors, the Vega graphics here are enhanced in three main ways over the previous generation. First is that it is built on the 7nm process node, and AMD put a lot of effort into physical design, allowing for a more optimized version that has a wider voltage/frequency window compared to the previous generation. Secondly, and somewhat connected, is the frequency: the new processors top out at 1750 MHz, rather than 1400 MHz, which would naturally give a simple 25 % boost with all other things being equal. Third on the list is memory, as the new platform supports up to DDR4-3200, rather than DDR4-2400, providing an immediate bandwidth boost which is what integrated graphics loves. There’s also the nature of the CPU cores themselves, having larger L3 caches, which often improves integrated graphics workloads that interact a lot with the CPU.
Normally, with the ASUS Zephryus G14, the switching between the integrated graphics and the discrete graphics should be automatic. There is a setting in the NVIDIA Control Panel to let the system auto-switch between integrated and discrete, and we would expect the system to be on the IGP when off the wall power, but on the discrete card when gaming (note, we had issues in our battery life test where the discrete card was on, but ASUS couldn’t reproduce the issue). In order to force the integrated graphics for our testing, because the NVIDIA Control Panel didn’t seem to catch all of our tests to force them onto the integrated graphics, we went into the device manager and actually disabled the NVIDIA graphics.
This left us with AMD’s best integrated graphics in its Ryzen Mobile 4000 series: 1750 MHz of enhanced Vega 8 running at DDR4-3200.
Renoir with Vega 8 – updated to 20.4 after this screenshot was taken
Our comparison point here is actually a fairly tricky one to set up. Unfortunately we do not have a Ryzen 7 3750H from the previous generation for comparison, but we do have an Honor Magicbook 14, which has a Ryzen 5 3500U.
This is a 15 W processor, running at 1200 MHz and DDR4-2400, which again makes the comparison a little tricky, but it is better than comparing it to the Intel HD630 graphics in the Razer Blade.
We also re-ran the benchmarks on the latest drivers with AMD's 65 Desktop APUs, the Ryzen 5 3400G (with Vega11) and the Ryzen 3 3200G (with Vega 8). These are running at DDR4-2933, the AMD maximum officially supported by these APUs (which means anything above this is overclocking).
This is a pretty substantial difference, no joke.
Hopefully we will get more variants of the Ryzen integrated graphics to test, along with an Ice Lake system.
267 Comments
View All Comments
Deicidium369 - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Except mean some sort of exclusion - I like you sister, except for here huge buck teeth.Accept mean to allow or to acquiesce...
Your teachers have dropped the ball with you horribly. Maybe one of those Word a Day calendars.
Qasar - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
wow.. yet more insults, the must be all you have left.cgeorgescu - Friday, April 10, 2020 - link
The thing is that the very few 8-core Intel mobile CPUs cost about $600 each and, at 45W, they are slower than this CPU at 35W.Check on YouTube, there are plenty of comparisons of this AMD CPU with Intel's greatest at 45W and even a few pushed to 90W.
Zingam - Saturday, April 11, 2020 - link
I don't care about battery life. I have a power cord but I care very much about performance, noise, heat and portability.eva02langley - Sunday, April 12, 2020 - link
I care about battery life, especially since I want a laptop I can use for office work that is not going to die on me after 3-4 hours.Deicidium369 - Sunday, April 12, 2020 - link
My now almost 6 month old Dell 13 2-in-1 with Ice Lake gets 11 to 12 hours of real use - previous 2 year old Dell 13 2-in-1s that the Ice Lakes replaced were 7-8 hours at most. Battery life was the number one consideration for upgrading - but it's also noticeably much faster.redtail3 - Thursday, May 14, 2020 - link
Oh stop it you dumb f&ck. You are clearly a paid intel shill with so much persistence."Your" battery claims mean nothing. Post the screenshots or a video link.
philehidiot - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link
I was really sceptical about the lack of a webcam. I think for the cost it's a simple addition. Then I remembered that I've had several laptops with webcams and I've just covered them up and never used them. Not once. When I have wanted to do anything requiring my face I've used my phone. Anyone I know who uses a webcam for business wants something far better than the integrated ones and so buys a decent standalone one.I wonder if this is a decision driven by use data from Windows 10 telemetry?
wr3zzz - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link
I Skype video on Android most of the time but Windows Hello is very nice and there are times I need the webcam because I am using the phone for tethering. Not having a webcam nowadays is a pretty weird decision, especially in a gaming notebook.RollingCamel - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link
You can use DroidCam to operate your Android phone or IP Cam as a webcam.