Early review gives us our first look at Ryzen 4000 series performance in a laptop

The first review of a laptop using a Ryzen 4000 series CPU has been published online. A Ukrainian website reviewed the upcoming Acer Swift 3 SF314-42, which houses the mid-tier Ryzen 5 4500U. With this being our first look at a Ryzen 4000 series laptop processor in action, we had a peek at the benchmark results. 

The review has since been taken back offline but Guru3D managed to preserve some of the details we are most interested in. For starters, the Ryzen 5 4500U is a 6-core chip with no SMT (hyper-threading) and a TDP of 15W. Based on the 7nm process node, this chip comes equipped with a Radeon Vega 6 GPU.

Unfortunately, the CPU review only has synthetic benchmarks to be taken into consideration. The benchmark and respective scores are as follows:

• Cinebench R15 CPU Multi – 785
• Cinebench R20 CPU Multi-Core – 1843
• 3DMark Time Spy – 947
• 3DMark Fire Strike – 2641
• PCMark 10 – 5024
• Geekbench 5 Single-Core – 1074
• Geekbench 5 Multi-core – 4282

Taking these results and comparing to the Ryzen 5 3500U (via Notebookcheck), the Ryzen 5 4500U's performance improvement ranges from 9% in 3DMark Fire Strike and goes as high as 43% in the Cinebench R20 Multi-core benchmark. Given that 3DMark Fire Strike is heavily influenced by GPU power, the slightly lower performance improvement is understandable, as the Ryzen 5 3500U ships with Radeon Vega 8 graphics instead of Vega 6.

As you may expect, CPU-based benchmarks show the biggest gains, with the minimum improvement being over 20%. In the only single core benchmark, there's an improvement of 21%, while in the multi-core tests the average performance boost is around 30%.

On another note, the Acer Swift 3 SF314-42 battery performance seems to be quite good. Based on the review, the 50.29 Wh battery is capable of handling PCMark 8 for 7 hours and 18 minutes, PC Mark 10 Video for 9 hours 44 minutes, and PC Mark 10 for 12 hours 4 minutes. Efficiency improvements with the new Ryzen 4000 series should be having an impact here, especially with the 4500U sitting in the 15W TDP range.

More laptops using this chip and other Ryzen 4000 models are due on March and April of 2020. We'll be looking to review some new Ryzen laptops ourselves this year pass our own judgement on the performance improvements.

KitGuru says: Are any of you curious to check out AMD's new Ryzen 4000 series laptop processors? 

Become a Patron!