Intel Core i7-11370H Review: Quad-Cores Aren't Enough in 2022

Today we've got another criterion review of a mobile processor, and this is admittedly kind of a weird i. The Intel Core i7-11370H is function of the Tiger Lake H35 line-up that was appear during CES 2022. Tiger Lake H35 bridges the gap betwixt Tiger Lake UP3 series for ultraportables, and their regular 45W H-series fries used for production-focused laptops and gaming machines.

The i7-11370H is weird in the sense that it's basically the aforementioned silicon used for ultraportable laptops, but overclocked. It uses the same four core, viii thread layout, simply bumps up the default power limit from 28W to 35W, and increases the base clock from three.0 to 3.3 GHz relative to the Core i7-1185G7. There'south as well 12MB of L3 enshroud, an Iris Xe GPU with 96 execution units, and the same memory support as Tiger Lake UP3.

When marketing this chip, Intel's performance slides focus on single-thread operation gains versus 10th-gen, but and so when talking multi-thread, Intel compares Tiger Lake H35 to their 11th-gen 15W processors – not exactly the aforementioned form of arrangement and it's highly unlikely a bigger gaming system would be tossing up between the 11370H and 1185G7. Intel's focus on integrated graphics is also strange given that most H-series laptops use a discrete GPU.

Nosotros guess this is partly down to the reality that Tiger Lake H35 and the Cadre i7-11370H does not pack every bit many cores as Intel's prior generation Comet Lake H-serial CPUs, which in the Cadre i7 range started with half-dozen cores and too had 8-core options.

We'll soon notice out how they stack up.

This launch honestly gets more than bizarre when yous look at the systems out at that place using the 11370H. Intel's plan for this chip was to create a new "ultraportable" gaming laptop segment, which would lead to thin fourteen-fifteen" systems suitable for 1080p gaming, harnessing the lower TDP of this scrap.

It isn't actually a new segment given Ryzen laptops take been doing this for a fiddling while now in systems similar the Zephyrus G14 and Flow X13 from Asus, but information technology's understandable that Intel wanted to compete here, as well.

However, that'due south not how OEMs are using the 11370H. The main organisation on the market today is the Asus TUF Dash F15, the laptop we accept in for benchmarking today.

It may even be the only organization using this CPU for at present. In any case, this is far from the 14" laptop with a Z-height of less than 18mm that Intel were talking about, this is just your regular 15.half dozen-inch entry-level to mid-range gaming system with a 20mm Z-height and weighing in at 2kg.

On a surface cess, this is a perfectly fine system. It has proper ventilation for the cooling fans underneath, a decent 1080p IPS display that runs at up to 240Hz, 16GB of DDR4-3200 in my review unit, and up to a GeForce RTX 3070 running at lxxx-85W which we likewise got. This is all standard gaming laptop stuff, and I quite similar the design found here at this price point.

But confusingly, Asus are choosing to operate the 11370H with a stock long-term power limit of 48W, not the 35W default TDP that Intel has specified. So not only is the TUF Dash F15 non really that new "ultraportable" style gaming organization, it doesn't fifty-fifty bother using the chip at 35W, which begs the question why Asus chose to use it over Intel's standard 45W H-series parts like the 10750H or 10870H. I can't answer that question, but maybe we'll find out in the operation testing.

Every bit the fleck operates at 48W out of the box, with a short boost period upward to 60W, we're comparing information technology to other 45W processors in our charts today, run at a long-term limit of 45W. This does requite a small power advantage to the 11370H compared to other fries in our charts, yet this is the limitation of testing with this platform and laptop. Permit'south boot off the benchmarks with some productivity tests.

Benchmarks

In Cinebench R20, the Core i7-11370H performs roughly on par with Intel's Core i7-10750H in the multi-threaded test. This does present a substantial gain to per-core performance equally the 10750H is a six-core chip, versus just 4 for the 11370H, but it still is a relatively weak performer compared to other parts in this chart.

Intel's own 8-core processors similar the 10870H are a step higher up in functioning, and the 11370H ends up virtually twenty% slower than AMD'southward concluding-generation Ryzen v 4600H quad-core. It is faster than Tiger Lake U-series processors as expected.

In the single-thread examination as expected we see the 11370H significantly outperform Comet Lake parts including the Core i9-10980HK with nearly a 25% improvement to performance. That's very substantial gen-on-gen and highlights what nosotros may see downwardly the line with Tiger Lake H45 chips.

The 11370H ends upwardly slightly faster than the 1185G7 and around on par with AMD's Ryzen 9 5980HS, so when comparison AMD to Intel in current generation processors, it'due south cervix and cervix in this workload.

In Handbrake, the Core i7-11370H is slightly slower than Intel's lowest Core i7 SKU from the previous generation, the Core i7-10750H. While not a huge margin, when comparing these parts at 45W and even factoring in the 11370H'southward slight power advantage, it's not a great result to run across a functioning regression. This CPU ends upwards 17% slower than the Cadre i7-10870H which is commonly used in refreshed gaming laptops of early 2022, and ends up 18% behind AMD's Ryzen five 4600H.

Very like results in Blender, which presents almost identical margins to the Handbrake test we were just looking at. As a production arrangement for these heavy CPU limited multi-core workloads, the 11370H fights admirably with just a quad-core design but ultimately falls short of other Core i7 processors and AMD's entire H-serial line from concluding year.

Code compilation shows a larger operation delta between the 11370H and 10750H, with the newer Tiger Lake processor catastrophe up 7 percent behind the last-gen Core i7 option. While information technology is faster than prior Skylake-era quad-cores operating in this power range, all college core count parts are better for Chromium compilation based on what nosotros've tested.

In MATLAB, the 11370H is able to perform reasonably well, producing performance more than in the range of the Core i7-10875H, and slightly alee of AMD's Ryzen v 4600H.

On the other hand, in our Microsoft Excel workload, the 11370H'due south operation goes backwards compared to the 10750H and ends upwards 25% slower than the Ryzen 5 4600H.

One of the strongest results for the 11370H is in PCMark 10's Applications examination, which measures Microsoft Office and Edge spider web browsing performance. Thanks to high single-thread operation gains compared to Comet Lake, this new Tiger Lake part is able to outperform the Core i7-10870H despite merely having half the CPU cores.

It's faster than AMD'due south new Ryzen 5000 35W parts, but not as fast equally the Ryzen 9 5900HX. Generally operation is similar to what Tiger Lake has produced previously in the ultraportable course.

7-Zip compression performance is disappointing, and actually isn't quite as fast as our Core i7-1185G7 laptop. This is because the TUF F15 but boosts upwards to 60W which is slightly lower than what our 1185G7 exam system achieved. In whatever case this is another workload where nosotros see a performance regression comparing the 11370H to the 10750H, where the 11370H is over 20 percent slower.

In fact the margin betwixt these Core i7 CPUs is quite similar in decompression too. 7-Nothing benefits quite a scrap from additional cores and threads, and then the 11370H's quad-core design puts it at a disadvantage hither despite gains to each cadre's performance.

Acrobat PDF exporting is some other strong event for the 11370H. The CPU'due south ability to button upwards as high as iv.8 GHz makes information technology the fastest CPU we've tested in our mobile test suite, slightly alee of AMD'south new Ryzen 5000 CPUs like the Ryzen 9 5980HS.

In Adobe Photoshop using the Puget Systems workload, the 11370H is able to match Intel's previous generation Core i7 processors. All the same, once again boost performance wasn't quite as practiced as previous Tiger Lake systems I've tested, and on top of that retentiveness bandwidth may be having some influence also. The TUF F15 uses DDR4 memory, instead of the higher-bandwidth LPDDR4X that tin can benefit Tiger Lake in some of these workloads.

In DaVinci Resolve we offset to see the effects of the Core i7-11370H when paired with a powerful discrete GPU. Despite the RTX 3070 generally existence one of the fastest 80W GPUs you can go, the 11370H appears to be holding it back somewhat in Puget Arrangement's Resolve benchmark.

It ends upwardly no faster than the Core i7-10750H paired with the RTX 2070 Max-Q, and behind eight-core CPUs that use either the RTX 3060 or RTX 3070. It appears the CPU is the limiting gene here, rather than the GPU, and ultimately this functioning is merely modest.

In Adobe Premiere using the Puget Systems export test, the Cadre i7-11370H delivers disappointing functioning. Premiere is more CPU heavy and does benefit from higher core count parts. Most of the H-serial processors we've tested in this workload are eight-core models, which deliver substantially college functioning. This makes the 11370H a weak option every bit a Premiere-capable laptop CPU.

Gaming Functioning

Next up we have some gaming tests. The big point of comparing here is between the Core i7-11370H and the Cadre i7-10870H using the aforementioned RTX 3070 80W GPU. Both of these CPUs are being used in this first moving ridge of refreshed RTX 30 series gaming laptops, so we'll become a good await at how they stack up in a moment.

I've tested these games at 1080p Ultra settings with Nvidia Optimus enabled, which is currently the almost reasonable CPU limited setup you might utilize a gaming laptop for.

First I desire to start with some GPU limited titles only to warm us up. One of those is Clay 5. We can see here that with the RTX 3070, the 11370H and 10870H systems perform about the aforementioned which is to be expected. Another title where we run across this occur is Metro Exodus, the previous generation system is slightly faster but overall information technology's quite similar performance.

But and so when nosotros become into more CPU express titles, the state of affairs changes entirely. Here nosotros have Resident Evil 2 using the Balanced preset, which is largely CPU limited on these systems at 1080p. The laptop equipped with the eight-cadre 10870H is substantially faster, we're talking 54% faster which is an insane margin for any sort of CPU limited hardware. Luckily though this is a bit of a worst case scenario for the TUF F15 and the 11370H, so allow's motion on.

In Star Wars Jedi Fallen Society nosotros withal practise run across a big performance discrepancy between the 10870H and 11370H configurations, just we're but talking a 29% difference here which is looking a lot better than the previous nautical chart. That'south still a large difference, but in a CPU limited game like this, the performance delta isn't that far off what we saw in some productivity benchmarks similar Blender or Chromium compilation. When yous're packing such a powerful GPU, having that extra CPU headroom does make a big divergence.

In Borderlands 3 we become a bit of relief. While the 10870H configuration is even so faster, it'southward now just eleven% alee which is a much more manageable margin and lower than some of the productivity deltas we saw. But it's withal slower than quite a popular laptop configuration with the new RTX 3070.

We'll show a couple more benchmarks here, one of them is Sentinel Dogs Legion. Once more we do see a performance discrepancy between the newer quad-core design and the older viii-core blueprint, with the 10870H pulling 16% ahead in this game. Once again everything is tested here with Optimus enabled in an apples-to-apples configuration, you will gain performance when you disable Optimus and let the brandish run direct off the dGPU, equally that will convalesce the CPU clogging somewhat, however other systems gain operation as well with straight dGPU connections and our goal here is to test in the about CPU express environment equally we can, as we do with all CPU reviews.

And the concluding chart I'll prove here is Death Stranding where again the 11370H arrangement is quite severely CPU bottlenecked. The 10870H configuration was a huge 36% faster as the quad-core CPU layout is a significant performance limiting factor when playing at 1080p. Given that running at 1080p with Optimus enabled is the default out of the box experience, that's not dandy.

All upwardly we tested 17 games on the TUF F15 and the performance numbers are not pretty compared to our Core i7-10870H laptop running the same RTX 3070 80W GPU. In some games that were extremely GPU limited, the functioning delta betwixt the two was small, 5% or less. At that place was some other group of results where the newer Tiger Lake design was 10 to 15 percent slower, and so in the worst cases nosotros had a couple of results over 35% slower where the games were very CPU limited and basically maxing out the CPU across all four cores.

At this point I don't think nosotros need to testify whatever more benchmarks for the Intel Core i7-11370H, because we take a pretty good idea of how it performs across both productivity and gaming. Nosotros do have a bit to say in this conclusion, so we'll showtime with the positives.

What We Learned

Right now, the Core i7-11370H is the fastest H-series processor from Intel in lightly-threaded workloads. That'south largely a past-product of Intel's 6 and eight core Tiger Lake H45 designs non being announced or released yet, but still, the 11370H can clock up to 4.eight GHz and that allows it to lucifer Ryzen 5000 processors in a number of single-threaded tests. Information technology's not an outright win for Intel, but does improve performance substantially over the 10th generation.

With amend IPC and functioning per cadre, the 11370H is besides quite a bit faster than prior quad-core designs from Intel in multi-threading. However, that'south merely about where the positives stop for this processor.

The major result for the 11370H is that lightly-threaded productivity applications are not the chief use case for an H-series laptop. People buying these sorts of systems – designs like the Asus TUF Dash F15 – are either wanting larger multi-core and GPU performance for stuff like video editing, 3D rendering and compiling; or they want a system for gaming. And the 11370H fails in both of these areas.

For multi-thread productivity workloads, the accented best thing I tin can say virtually the 11370H is that information technology's equally fast equally Intel'southward last-generation mainstream Cadre i7, the Cadre i7-10750H, depending on the benchmark. But in many cases it'southward slower than that function, equally Intel are providing fewer CPU cores. This ways that when comparing Intel's new, baseline Core i7 model to Intel's previous baseline Core i7 model at roughly the aforementioned power, we're on average seeing a multi-core performance regression.

And that'due south the nigh favorable comparison we take in the Cadre i7 range. Put the i7-11370H up against the eight-core i7-10870H and the newer 11th-gen processor loses by 15% or more. Put information technology upwards against AMD'south last-gen entry-level Ryzen v role and it loses by even more. There is a articulate trend that for these workloads, a sizable IPC gain can't offset the reduction in CPU core count.

As for gaming, the Core i7-11370H is bluntly not well suited for information technology. Information technology causes significant CPU bottlenecks in many titles, which is like to what we've seen previously with Intel'southward quad-cadre parts, it'due south just that at present nosotros have fifty-fifty faster laptop GPUs similar the RTX 3070 on hand. At a bare minimum in today's gaming laptops with a high-stop part like the 3070 you want a decent six-cadre CPU, if not better.

The 11370H existence a power overclocked U-series part isn't cutting it hither. I think Intel'south endeavor at making a low-power CPU into an H-series role for gaming laptops has failed.

The key takeaway hither is that the Core i7-11370H is one CPU you lot should avoid.

If y'all stick to previous-gen Core i7 CPUs, or Ryzen 4000 or newer, I think in general you lot'll end upward with a superior experience. The risk of severely bottlenecking an RTX 3070 with this inadequate quad-core CPU is far too high for my liking.

I also take meaning upshot with the name Intel has used here. I have no idea how this ended up as a Core i7 part, given you have to become all the mode back to Kaby Lake seventh generation parts in early 2022 to notice the last quad-core H-serial Core i7 CPU: the Cadre i7-7700HQ, as an example. Since and so, the Core i7 range has denoted half dozen-core CPUs, or more than recently 8-core CPUs. Putting the 11370H in the Cadre i7 series serves to both dilute Intel'south Cadre i7 brand, and deceive less tech-savvy customers into thinking they are getting a powerful processor when they aren't.

Simply put, the Core i7-11370H should be a Cadre i3 processor. Instead, Intel seems eager to cram four, six and eight cadre parts all into the Core i7 range. If and when that happens, what is even the point of having i3, i5 and i7 ranges for laptops.

Finally, the Asus TUF Nuance F15 happens to exist a fine laptop on most aspects. If the pick of CPU would be a proper 10th-gen Core i7 part or a Ryzen processor, we could certainly recommend you took a look. We don't understand why Asus chose to utilize this CPU instead as information technology seems well-nigh other OEMs passed on it for their early on 2022 refreshes. Did they want to experiment and come across what the result was? Nosotros tin't say for sure, only unfortunately the 11370H is belongings the F15 back from greater things.