PC World - USA (2020-11)

NOVEMBER 2020 PCWorld 37

which are canned tests built on practical

applications.

While we think there is value in them, we

skipped running Intel’s own tests, because it

invites too much hand-wringing from

worrywarts. That doesn’t mean we skipped

what Intel tested though, which you’ll see

below.

HOW WE TESTED

For this performance preview, we compared

the Core i7-1185G7 and Iris Xe graphics to

three contemporaries: “Comet Lake U” in a

Dell XPS 13 7390 with 6-core Core i7-10710U

and HD graphics, “Ice Lake” in a Dell XPS 13

2-in-1 7390 with 4-core Core i7-1065G7 and

bottom of it, and
since we have
seen the inside,
we’ll sketch out
where the
components are.
The laptop
itself is built on a
fairly light 14-inch
body. In weight,
it’s actually very
close to the
10th-gen Dell XPS
13 2-in-1 7390 and
slightly lighter
than Lenovo’s
14-inch, Ryzen
7-based Slim 7.
The laptop is actually capable of taking
discrete graphics and features two heat pipes
routed to a single fan and fin stack. The laptop
features a Core i7-1185G7 Tiger Lake CPU
with 16GB of LPDDR4X/4266 RAM and a 1TB
NVMe SSD. There screen is a 1920x1080
panel without touch.
We can guess who made it, but we’ll stick
to our agreement and refer to it as a reference
system. It’s pretty easy, however, to search for
14-inch laptops with Comet Lake U and
discrete GeForce GTX graphics if you want to
see it in its branded trim.
Other than those agreements, we were
free to run what we wanted. Intel did provide
its RUGs, or “Representative Usage Guides,”

The Intel reference laptop does feature an Intel logo on the lid.