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Temperatures, Clocks, and Power
Looking at the chart for temps, power, and clocks gives us a good overview of how the Core i7-1195G7 CPU operates in Gigabyte’s U4 UD under the Performance power mode.
We see the processor start off at around 40W package power and a little over 3.5GHz. But this translates into a package temperature bouncing against the 100°C throttling point. As such, the processor power draw and frequency drop to around 26-27W and 3GHz, respectively, where the chip holds stable at higher fan speeds and just about manageable temperatures.
Once the PL2 duration is surpassed at around 220 seconds, the chip drops down to 20W sustained package power which translates into 2.6GHz average core clock. The temperature then sits at a much more manageable 80C where it stays for the remainder of our 10-minute Cinebench run.
Do remember that the Core i7-1195G7 can be configured to run at 28W sustained in its TDP-up configuration. So, Gigabyte is clearly making a distinct choice to leave around 8W worth of power delivery on the table. This is presumably to avoid higher power delivery requirements, greater system power consumption, and higher temps and fan speed inside the U4 UD chassis.
That's probably a fair choice for a 14” ultraportable of this ilk. But it is clear that at least around 400MHz of clock speed from the processor is left on the table.
Noise
You can see an example of our noise testing result in the video review.
In our testing, the fan ran at 52dBA whilst under sustained Cinebench loading. That was when measured by a sound meter at the trackpad.
The fan also often ramps under idle or low-load conditions, which can be annoying. So, I don’t think that the Gigabyte fan curves are very well tuned or noise efficient currently. It would be good for this to be looked into and possibly fixed via a firmware update in my opinion.
SSD
No issues with the thermals of the 512GB PCIe Gen 4×4 NVMe SSD. Speed results were pretty good, too, with the sequential read speeds actually reaching 5GBps and making good use of that Gen 4 interface.
Battery
Battery life with the laptop in its Entertainment power mode is pretty uninspiring at well below six hours in the PCMark 10 Modern Office test. This means that a solid workday of usage from the U4 UD is unlikely. And that is quite disappointing for this sort of laptop with Tiger Lake-U-series hardware and a 1080p display.
It looks like Gigabyte’s decision to cheap out on the 36Whr battery hasn’t done many favours in terms of system runtime.
