Tech Advisor – October 2019

OCTOBER 2019 • TECH ADVISOR 59

BUYING GUIDE

That performance similarity demonstrates why we

recommend the cheaper Core i5 version to most. The

difference is not huge in most scenarios, although a

bump up to 16GB RAM is useful for all sorts of more

demanding apps, as well as general multi-tasking.

In one other respects we’re slightly disappointed by

the Envy 13. But it’s largely Nvidia’s fault.

You get Nvidia’s brand new MX250 GPU. It’s a low-

power graphics chipset for laptops without cooling

systems designed to get rid of the extra heat of a true

gamer’s card. Still, key rivals like the Huawei MateBook

13 and Dell XPS 13 rely on integrated graphics, and the

ZenBook S13 has the older MX150.

Here are our benchmarks so you can see how the

Envy 13 performs against its rivals. We’ve included the

MateBook X Pro as it also has the MX250 GPU.

Geekbench 4 Multi-core