MARCH 2021 PCWorld 37down the road: Jersey-wearing Mac fans may
protest that putting AMD’s 35-watt Ryzen 9
5980HS up against the low-wattage M1 is
simply unfair, especially considering that the
Asus ROG Flow X13 also features a GeForce
GTX 1650 Max-Q GPU.
We agree that it’s not a traditional
oranges-to-oranges comparison, but because
the MacBook Pro M1 and the ROG Flow X13
basically weigh the same, a potential buyer
would naturally see them as competitors.
We’ll kick this off with Maxon’s
Cinebench R20, a popular test based on the
Cinema4D 3D modeling and rendering
application. The test is nearly CPU-bound,
and it loves processor cores. It also tends to
hit older Intel CPUs.
The leader of the pack is the Asus ROG Flow
X13 and its Ryzen 9 5980HS chip, with the older
Ryzen 4000-based laptops (Lenovo IdeaPad Slim
7 and Asus ROG Zephyrus G14) fairly close
behind. Intel’s somewhat newer Core i7-10870H
in the Gigabyte Aorus 17 actually does relatively
well, but it has the advantage of the beefy
cooling from the six-pound body.
The MacBook Pro M1 doesn’t look so hot
and actually loses to the 11th-gen Core
i7-1185G7 CPU in the MSI Prestige 14. But
we’d be playing favorites if we didn’t
mention that one huge disadvantage to the
MacBook Pro is the use of Apple’s Rosetta 2
to handle translation of the x86 code to Arm.
So you should withhold your judgment here.
Cinebench R20 allows you to run using a
single thread, so we did that with all of the
laptops. To be honest, they’re mostly in the
same ballpark, but the standouts are AMD’s
new Ryzen 5000 in the Asus ROG Flow X13,
and Intel’s 11th-gen Tiger Lake chip in the MSI
Prestige 14 laptop.
Maxon has updated Cinebench R20 to
Cinebench R23, and among the new changes is
a default stress test mode, which runs
the system for a
minimum of 10
minutes. The new
version also offers
native Apple M1 support.
As you can see, the M1 in the MacBook
Pro picks up a lot of performance. In theThe Asus ROG Flow X13 weighs just 3 pounds
despite having a Ryzen 9 5980HS inside.