How well would these laptops (X1 Yoga) run Dolphin?

[amicose]

I'm going to be living abroad for a few months, and I also need a new laptop. I'm not going to be away for long enough to warrant getting a gaming laptop when I already have a gaming PC I'm happy with at home, so I don't want to let gaming (mainly emulation) influence my decisions too much.

I prefer Thinkpads for work, and am thinking of the latest X1 Yoga:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-Thi...922.0.html
or
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-Thi...148.0.html

For work, I'd probably choose the i5 as these reviews says the performance increase with the i7 is negligible, and it shaves about two hours off the battery runtime.

But would the i7 improve emulation performance significantly?
And would either of these laptops run Dolphin at 30/60fps and 1080p (or even higher)?

[TKSilver]

After looking at the thermals and the CPU review sections, my guess is that while the CPU is capabile of running dolphin you will probably run into issues where you can only run it for short sessions before performance deteriorates considerably. Also the igpu is not the best if you want to run dolphin at 1080p (or higher).

Though the good news is that the i7 should not really help that much since it will hit temp\power limits faster.

[amicose]

After looking at the thermals and the CPU review sections, my guess is that while the CPU is capabile of running dolphin you will probably run into issues where you can only run it for short sessions before performance deteriorates considerably. Also the igpu is not the best if you want to run dolphin at 1080p (or higher).

Though the good news is that the i7 should not really help that much since it will hit temp\power limits faster.

Thanks - how short would a short session be? 10 mins? An hour? And could performance be more stable at 720p?

[TKSilver]

720p or native would be more stable for the iGPU

As far as time, with out personally testing it in the same conditions you are going to be using it in I can't say for sure but probably closer to the 30mins-1hour then the 10 min mark for heat to cut down on the turbo and cut the single threaded performance... though how demanding the game is on the CPU will also effect things.

[Helios]

Performance will likely be fine.

I play Dolphin on a similarly sized laptop with similar cooling and it's fine these days.

People overstate modern intel CPUs thermal output.

However, yes you probably won't be reaching fullspeed at 1080p for many games. As soon as you load both the CPU and GPU, it starts to chug a bit.

[Nintonito]

Performance will likely be fine.

I play Dolphin on a similarly sized laptop with similar cooling and it's fine these days.

People overstate modern intel CPUs thermal output.

However, yes you probably won't be reaching fullspeed at 1080p for many games. As soon as you load both the CPU and GPU, it starts to chug a bit.

Does yours have an ultrabook class CPU? I noticed the one he listed is a U series processor, and my experience so far with coffee lake has been TDP power limit throttling 24/7. Not saying they all do that but if Lenovo rates that laptop closer to 15W rather than 28 i can’t imagine performance will stay solid.

[Helios]

Virtually every intel CPU not stuck in a desktop will not reach it's turbo clocks 100% of the time.

80% is fine.

[Nintonito]

Virtually every intel CPU not stuck in a desktop will not reach it's turbo clocks 100% of the time.

80% is fine.

I know I was just curious. The power limit throttling is a pretty absolute limitation and since intel doesn’t make 65W or 95W rated parts the throttling happens regardless of temps. On higher end laptops like mine you can raise the limit to the boost limit but that voids warranty and also might not work if the board can’t sustain that. Still a bit irritating that my reasonably cool 6 core throttles automatically after 30 seconds. (What’s the point MSI of having a cooler boost fan mode if the default mode can handle a 45W CPU allowance anyways? Smh.)

Intel also made this worse than kaby lake because the TDP values haven’t changed but on laptops the core count has skyrocketed. They can see the problem pretty clearly since nearly every chip this year has a lower base clock. Still, having the i9 capped to 45W is absurd (you can disable it and the MSI model does officially handle 95W power delivery but still out of the box 45W).

[Helios]

The laptop in question is just a dual core, so theres no extra cores to skyrocket TDP.

Given the laptop's dimensions and it's actually *thicker* than my XPS 15, cooling will likely be fine.

However, it's still not a great experience if you want to run games at greater than 720p. I'd just get an XPS 13/15, get yourself an nvidia GPU and an equivalent CPU for roughly the same price.

EDIT: oh wait the XPS is way cheaper, hah.

Yeah just get an XPS 15.

[Nintonito]

The laptop in question is just a dual core, so theres no extra cores to skyrocket TDP.

Given the laptop's dimensions and it's actually *thicker* than my XPS 15, cooling will likely be fine.

However, it's still not a great experience if you want to run games at greater than 720p. I'd just get an XPS 13/15, get yourself an nvidia GPU and an equivalent CPU for roughly the same price.

EDIT: oh wait the XPS is way cheaper, hah.

Yeah just get an XPS 15.

Coffee lake ultrabook CPU’s are quad core. The reviews he linked confirm that if any doubts. Dual core is now only the Celeron (and maybe Pentium).