The Lemon Fool

In the last 9 months or so, I watched video review of mini pcs, not desktops, by someone who has a popular YouTube channel that covers many models and pc topics. I forget who, sadly, as I want to go back and check some of his observations.

He was referring to an intel chip, of the i3, i5 and i7 variety. I'm not familiar with anything above i7.

He talked about generation 12, I think, being fine, but 13 and 14 were said to be flawed in some way. Not sure. Maybe they were only minor improvements, or some bug type issue? Does anyone know?

This does not relate to the instability issues discussed this week.

Thanks

If you mean a British youtube channel then it could be this chap. This is his website which has links to his channel.

https://www.explainingcomputers.com/

12th, 13th and 14th generation Intel processors are all the same architecture, which means that there are no differences in the design of the processing cores, there are just improvements in the manufacturing process. 13th and 14th gen processors can run a little bit faster than the 12th gen but at the expense of requiring more power when at full speed. That's a major issue in mini PCs as extra power draw means extra heat to dissipate, and there isn't room in the case to incorporate more substantial cooling solutions. In practice that means that you can't always take advantage of the extra speed available as the CPU will automatically limit its speed if it gets too hot.

fourtwentyfour wrote:He was referring to an intel chip, of the i3, i5 and i7 variety. I'm not familiar with anything above i7.

A bit at a tangent but my ‘power’ PC built a couple of years ago uses an i9 and it was well established then.

I believe the i3, i5, i7, i9 etc is a separate question from which generation it is e.g. I have a laptop which has an i7 chip 10th generation. When I bought it, there were i9 models available, but earlier generations. Is the 3,5,7,9 etc the core, and the generation to do with improvements/modifications?

My techie friend thought that the i7 gen 10 was good and well-matched with the graphics card and other stuff in the bundle.

masped wrote:12th, 13th and 14th generation Intel processors are all the same architecture, which means that there are no differences in the design of the processing cores, there are just improvements in the manufacturing process. 13th and 14th gen processors can run a little bit faster than the 12th gen but at the expense of requiring more power when at full speed. That's a major issue in mini PCs as extra power draw means extra heat to dissipate, and there isn't room in the case to incorporate more substantial cooling solutions. In practice that means that you can't always take advantage of the extra speed available as the CPU will automatically limit its speed if it gets too hot.

This - but with addition the OEM's can tune the ACPI firmware settings to change things like fan curves etc.
Tablets and laptops are reaching similar issues with ever increasing speeds causing thermal throttling issues not just with CPU's but SSD's, NIC's et al.
Everything is getting heat sinks and active cooling these days, there are some new fan technologies coming to market that should help.

My (mini) desktop is an i7, but 4th generation from about 10 years ago. With 8GB memory and an SSD it meets my needs easily though.

However I'm on Windows 10 as it's not compatible with 11.

Scott.