Thermal Performance Comparison: Snapdragon X Elite vs Apple M3 vs Intel Core Ultra 7

LaptopMedia.com News Thermal Performance Comparison: Snapdragon X Elite vs Apple M3 vs Intel Core Ultra 7

From: Severin Kolakov 29 May 2024 / 16:21 | 0

We’re getting a bunch of new CPUs, all revolutionary and pushing the boundaries of what laptops are capable of. The new chips that everyone’s currently talking about are the Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus. We’ve shown some performance results of the Snapdragon X Elite vs The Apple M4, but today we’ve got another type of test featuring the new Qualcomm chip.

Thermals are everything with laptops, as they need to run within reasonable temperatures so as not to cause any throttling and limit performance. Today we’ll show you a thermal performance comparison between the Snapdragon X Elite, the Apple M3, and the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, as well as the Core i7-1255U.

The thermal tests use the new Surface Laptop (Snapdragon X Elite), the older Surface Laptop 5 (Core i7-1255U), the Apple MacBook Air (Apple M3), and the MSI Prestige 16 Evo AI (Core Ultra 7 155H). It consists of a 10-minute run of Cinebench 2024, after which the photos are taken using a thermal imaging camera. Two tests were run, one for Single-Core and one for Multi-CCore performance.

Multi-Core

The most powerful CPU of the bunch, the Ultra 7, has the highest temperature, sitting at 56.2°C. However, the X Elite and the M3 are more interesting as they’re direct competitors. The M3 runs a lot cooler, with a difference of around 5°C. Keep in mind that this is with the CPUs under full load at 100%. The Surface Laptop with the Snapdragon X Elite shows two hotspots, one in the middle of the keyboard and one near the hinges. This is because of the cooling vent which is on the back, just below the hinge.

Snapdragon X Elite
Max Temp – 50.3ºC

Intel Core i7-1255U
Max Temp – 47.1ºC

Apple M3
Max Temp – 45.8ºC

Intel Core Ultra 7 155H
Max Temp – 56.2ºC

Single-Core

In the Single-core test, you can see that the Core i7-1255U is the hottest of the four chips with a hotspot of 44°C. The rest all keep a temperature of around 35°C, with the MacBook Air’s test covering the least amount of surface area.