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Hi, I have a question. How good is an i5-8265U relative to an i5-2500 and i7-4720HQ (these were the CPUs for my older desktop and gaming laptop which I replaced 2-3 years ago). A member of my family recently replaced his laptop and gave me his older model, an Asus Vivobook with i5-8265U. I was wondering how does it stack against my own older cpus i5-2500 and i7-4720HQ, because passmark says it is better (i5-8265 scores 6000 points versus 5700 of i7-4720HQ and 4000 of i5-2500), but, after utilizing for a while, I have my doubts, because i5-8265U seems slower especially when multitasking.
All of them are 4 core, but i5-8265u has a lower base speed, 1.60 Ghz, than the other twos. Does that matter much?

If you have them all, just run various benchmarks. Re clock speeds, just check what it runs at in practice.

i5-2500 is a desktop part, and with a 95W TDP. So no power or thermal limitations. But it's old, and only 4 threads (which may or may not matter). The 4720HQ is 47W TDP. The 8265U is 15W, and may support DDR4.

I find it always difficult to find good info online on the relative performance of laptop CPUs.

The following suggests the 4720HQ and 8265U are comparable on average, but I don't know how reliable that info is (such as the specific laptops tested, or their cooling performance):
https://www.notebookcheck.net/4720HQ-vs ... 596.0.html

The following suggests the 4720HQ and 2500 are comparable, but there's even less concrete info than the above:
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/I ... 0045vsm517

I have not really used cpu benchmark tools until now, do you have any recommendation?

And speaking of, what is your opinion on the reliability of cpubenchmark.net? Do you think it gives a good pictures of cpu performances or it is rubbish?

I didn't necessarily mean CPU benchmarking software. Just anything that does a lot of work and is easy to measure.

Simple stuff that's pertinent: WinRAR, 7zip, VeraCrypt have integrated benchmarks in the menus.

More complex but still easy enough: Video encoding.
I suppose a popular simple GUI tool would be Handbrake, and your codec of choice (x264 or x265).
May want to tweak the number of threads to see what's better for each CPU: 4 or 8 (or 6?).

No specific opinion on PassMark. It's another synthetic datapoint.

There are other synthetic things reviewers like to use:
http://numberworld.org/y-cruncher/
https://www.superpi.net/Download/ (I think the WP version is multithreaded?)
Maybe AIDA64 for memory/cache latency and bandwidth. Though not sure if the trial version shows everything.

One more thing: while tinkering around with the Asus Vivobook, I noticed that I can enter the BIOS only in legacy mode, but the "System Information" says the BIOS mode is UEFI and there is an EFI partition on my drive (which is GPT, btw). Any idea why I can't enter the UEFI mode?

Not sure, but maybe GPT forces EFI booting regardless of the BIOS setting.

Do you mean you can't enter the BIOS settings specifically in EFI mode?
I think it might be the same also in non-EFI mode.

Sounds like an annoying anti-feature (?) that prevents entering the BIOS while booting from hibernation (and maybe sleep). Try using "restart" from Windows, instead of shut down or hibernate.
Also see options 2+ mentioned here.

meerkt wrote:

Not sure, but maybe GPT forces EFI booting regardless of the BIOS setting.

Do you mean you can't enter the BIOS settings specifically in EFI mode?

Yes. I can enter BIOS only in legacy mode. Which is weird because System Information says BIOS mode is UEFI.

Sounds like an annoying anti-feature (?) that prevents entering the BIOS while booting from hibernation (and maybe sleep). Try using "restart" from Windows, instead of shut down or hibernate.
Also see options 2+ mentioned here.

Did so, but it had no effect.

As for options mentioned in your link, there is no UEFI/BIOS boot mode in the BIOS options.

Noldor wrote:

As for options mentioned in your link, there is no UEFI/BIOS boot mode in the BIOS options.

I don't understand. If you can enter the BIOS, mission accomplished.

The choice of options available in the BIOS is another question, and I don't think you can do much about it (other than BIOS modding, which you're unlikely to want to get into).

Or did you mean that the BIOS screens are in plain text mode and not some fancier graphical UI?
If so, that has no bearing on whether the BIOS boots in legacy or EFI mode:




BTW, the distinction between CSM and Legacy (if both are available) isn't fully clear:
https://superuser.com/questions/1284392 ... -boot-mode

I think I made a mistake: what I meant is that BIOS does not show up in EZ mode. Like this:

https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/nb/X ... X509_A.pdf (see page 63 and further).

Instead th BIOS is in plain text mode, like in your screen pics above.