Want to know if your laptop has Optimus? I've made this page covering every laptop I've tested and noting 'yes' or 'no' if it has Optimus: jarrods.tech/list-of-gaming-laptops-with-mux-switch/
Jarrod should just be called THEE laptop guy at this point. When not reviewing laptops, he'll be giving useful tips to make the most out of your laptop.
@@aardbeiwastaken Those two deserved the title. Jarrod is massively focused on technical practice and Dave is more keen to the experience and immersion.
@@aardbeiwastaken Absolutely false. What are you on? Dave2D doesn't care at all about performance. He'll recommend a laptop just cause it looks nicer. Absolutely 0 critical decision-making
@@marsbars5941 it is a joke. To unlock the full performance on the g15 strix you will need a external monitor (it has no mux switch) . I returned mine. Got way to hot and it is under performing compared to the legion 5 line-up.
I'm so happy I stumbled upon laptop review youtube channels, including this one for becoming enlightened about the issue of optimus and mux switches, the presence of the latter being a huge part of how I landed on the Legion 5 pro for my purchase this year. I don't know how I would have made nearly as informed of a purchase otherwise. Awesome video detailing what Optimus is and how to work with/around it.
I wish I waited for the legions with rtx 30 series, but I got the aorus 15g xc with i7 10870h 32gb ram and rtx 3070 105w. It’s a great laptop, but the legion is superior. Also the power is on the right side on the aorus, but at least it has a mux.
Of all the weird shit asus does, i can't blame them on this one. Dell has $4k laptops without mux, so does a lot of ultra high end laptop builders. Like the bad ram, I think manufacturers were blindsided on how big of a performance hit this caused, both figured out by jarrods tech afaik. My man needs consulting bonuses from companies lol.
@@LeFatalpotato the Dell X17 has display options with Advanced Optimus. Asus offers exactly *one* model with a mux switch and that is the S17, and not even on all display options.
Its good to see that you post a update video about this difference in performance every year Gives a good idea of how much does improved hardware gets affected without mux
Dude, thank you so much for this video! I would have never known why my 3080 laptop felt kind of sluggish compared to benchmarks of other 3080 laptops. I decided to hook up my external monitor and instantly I went from about 70-80fps in Warzone (100 if I was lucky) to never dipping below 110. Averaging 120-140. I didn't think it would actually be that much but that's pretty insane.
On my old Dell Precision laptops I noticed turning off optimus (or whatever it was called before it was optimus) that it not only gave a small performance boost, but even more importantly a massive response time boost. With it on, racing or fps games were so laggy they were essentially unplayable. I also noticed screen tearing was drastically better with optimus off. This was with some pretty low end gpus though, old radeon and kepler quadro stuff.
@Dragon Rip I had a Precision M6800, and there was a setting in BIOS called switchable graphics. You want that off. Only works if there is a discrete GPU installed.
So I have the Legion 5i 2060 model(with the 115w bios swap) and I recently installed Far Cry 6. Ultra setting 80-100 fps(1080p)... brilliant!... however the microstutter every few seconds was unbearable... Disabling Optimus and the microstutter is completely GONE. Also higher FPS across the board. Crazy the power you can get out of these laptops with a couple tweaks! Cheers. R.I.P. Alexi Laiho
Bought and promptly refunded wd:Legion because of the microstutters. How were you able to achieve this? Did you just turn off hybrid mode in Lenovo Vantage? I'm hoping to eliminate microstutters on my Legion 5 3060. Because it's very noticeable especially at high framerates
@@k7880 Yeah turn off hybrid mode in vantage, system will want to restart. I couldn't believe the difference it made. Only downside is it will use battery faster when unplugged but its easily enabled again if you need more battery life.
Make sure you tune your CPU settings, Nvidia Control Panel settings as well as windows settings. This can reduce the power consumption both on GPU and CPU. Hope this helps :)
@@opness5275 I did all sorts of experiments and managed to see the battery pointing to the 7++ hr mark, but it's very inconsistent. As soon as I start doing anything different than reading a text doc (f.x. youtube at 720p) hours cut in half.
Never take these reviews seriously.. you can watch it for reference and to get some idea about the product but don't rely completely on it .. as the unit THEY receive is better in certain aspects (i think so).. also Jerrod literally knows everything about laptops so he knows what settings to change and how to get maximum battery time ... It might not be possible for us to know Everything in that much detailed ..we might not even know some settings as we are obviously not as invested in laptops as he is. So just take these RUclips reviews for reference .. don't take it as 100% true.
Jarrod mann really thanks for your videos I really love your work and its all just perfect for deciding and chose laptops Amazing work, I hope u continue this and bring us review of more and more laptops 🌻
I really love seeing this after ordering a laptop without a MUX switch. To be fair, the price was so good that I can't really complain. Plus, I don't think the CPU is going to be bottlenecking the GPU, so hopefully the performance hit wont be too bad
There is sometimes one problem with external monitor on laptops without optimus - if laptop lid is open everyting is fine on external, but when the lid is closed games stutter and only option to solve this is disabling integrated gpu in device manager which sometimes causes another problem - no more sleep option :D This problem exists for years already and seems to be windows+nvidia+intel fault.
Informative video, however, I feel that this should have been tested with an entry level GPU, such as the 3050 or the 3050 Ti, where you could actually take advantage of this clever feature. It's difficult to say if the results would be similar percentagewise, but I'd assume so. This gives newer computers with entry level cards with this feature a bit of an edge when compared to older laptops with a 2060 or 1650 etc.
When is the review of the dell g15 5515 coming? I really wanna see how the midrange dell laptop performs. Twas even available for $1077 few days ago on dell website.
Honestly I just thought the older video was garbage compared to my newer standard of production quality and I also thought I could explain the topic a lot clearer. But yeah it might be interesting to see how much future iGPUs limit, if advanced optimus or similar becomes easy to implement there may be no need.
I am not that worried about getting more fps on my games , i just want to know which mode is best for the longevity of my laptop as for me personally it doesnt make much difference between 70-90 fps
I know it's been two years, but I'll leave this here for anyone who stumbles upon the comment. For longevity, whether you use optimus or not doesn't really make a difference. Both the CPU and GPU are going to last just as long, independently of which you choose. The battery longevity could be affected if the laptop isn't plugged in though. With optimus off, when you're just using the GPU, it drains the battery much faster. If you use the laptop while it isn't plugged in often, you probably want optimus on. You shouldn't be gaming or doing any resource intensive tasks without it plugged in, so you don't really need the extra performance from the GPU. Obviously if the battery is quickly draining and being recharged constantly, that could impact the longevity of the battery. Long story short, no, don't worry too much about the longevity of the laptop. Assuming you're doing all the required maintenance, it will be fine. The only real concern could be the battery if the laptop is often used while not plugged in over a long period of time, in which case I would refer you to your battery settings. Usually there are options to limit the amount of charge the battery can hold to help protect it in the long run.
@@Beanpolr I appreciate the response man thanks, as a quick question can you give me a list of all the required maintenance you mentioned, just for cross checking In general i try to keep battery levels between 30 and 90%, dont leave it without charge, game on battery and all Longevity is important to me due to being a broke college student , really needed a laptop to last me 4 years atleast till i can earn money, it has being going strong for 2 years now though :)
@@pranavchopra_0075 For maintenance, the biggest thing is to monitor the performance and temperatures, especially when gaming. That'll alert you pretty early if something is starting to go wrong or become less efficient for some reason. As for actual maintenance tasks, the most important thing with a laptop is make sure the fans are clean and cleared, along with the heatsink. You can open up most laptops and clean dust and debris from the fans, but oftentimes it will also build up further in where you cannot see. In those cases sometimes you might have to send it to someone to fully clean, as it's not always easy to access certain internals. Depending on your environment, I would probably at least try to clear the fans out once every couple months. To prevent buildup I wouldn't use it in bed, or in areas with a lot of dust (so if possible keep it away from areas pets frequent). The fans are the most important thing, as airflow is what cools your components and stops them from melting themselves. Other than that, make sure all your software is kept up to date as much as possible, that way the possible causes of issues are narrowed down if they arise. You could also look into replacing the thermal paste, but that doesn't have to be done regularly. If you've had it for a couple years it might be worth doing. That shouldn't be a big issue though, most laptops are good as far as that goes. Other than that, you should be fine. If everything is working good, don't worry about it. Sounds like you're doing your best to take care of it. I wouldn't be worried unless you notice some unusual behavior or reductions in performance.
Ty for another brilliant video Jarrod! I bought this very same beauty and I'm wondering is it worth it to have optimus disabled if you're also gonna be doing work and browsing? Does disabling optimus have a negative impact in workloads like Adobe CC or Blender that outweights hindering a little the gaming performance? (laptop always plugged in)
Hey cool video, do you still see this difference with lower teir gpus? Is any difference in a lower teir gpu worth looking for the ability to disable optimus?
X1 R1 with: -i7 since the i9 gets too hot -RTX 3080 for the 165W TGP -32GB atleast since the 16GB version uses high density sticks -1080p 360Hz screen for the best gaming experience (wish they had a QHD version)
Would it be possible to use a "dummy plug" to fool the laptop in to thinking there is an external monitor, yet get the benefits of Optimus disabled using the laptop's screen? Thanks for a good explanation of Optimus. And all your hard work testing products for us.
There won't be any "dummy plug". Because the laptop screen is wired to onboard graphic (intel uhd/ amd vega), then the onboard graphic to the GPU. It is no way for the laptop screen to bypass the onboard graphic (with only optimus). In contrast, the hdmi, usb c(display port) are usually wired directly to the GPU so that's why it bypass the optimus system.
Very instructive video, I used to think that it was the opposite and that the bottleneck happened when you connected the laptop to an external display.
Hey Jarrod, now that you have the Legion laptops, will you test the effect of asynchronous dual channel ram on games and creative workloads (video editing, 3D rendering, etc.)?
I haven't forgotten about it. I actually made this video about a month ago and haven't had the Legion 7 in ages, but I did recently buy the newest 5, so once the reviews are done I'll probably use that. It's going to be like a solid week testing just for one video which is why it keeps getting put off.
Hey Jarrod, are you going to re-review old 3000 series laptops but now have 11th gen intel cpus? I'm looking for something as a backup option to the legion 5 pro because of their availability and would really like to know how good the 11800h AERO 15 is. keep up the great vids!
Considering U processor laptops come with much smaller batteries there is no real way to do a fair comparison. But most of those laptops get 6-8 hours of battery life. Sometimes more depending on the use case. And the Lenovo 7 in this video can get those level of battery use with optimus on by just having a larger battery. So if it had a U level processor it would have much better battery life.
That would make a cool experiment, I had an i7 8750h gtx 1060 laptop that lasted on battery no longer than 1 hour (not playing just browsing the web or doing some word) and when I was outside I used to turn down the tdp to 20 watts for boost and it did the trick, really got at least 3 hours of battery out of it, the problem was that the frequency also suffered very very much, specially the boost clock for single core couldn't reach anything beyond 2.9ghz (from 4.1 on the normal tdp) so it became a weird experience, U CPUs on the other hand are designed to reach better boost clocks with those lower tdps, but that was on an Intel chip, pretty sure an AMD one will do better, I'll update this comment in two weeks when my Ryzen laptop arrives
@Vikas Dewangan It depends. My gaming laptop has a 3 way Switchable Graphics: iGPU only, Nvidia Optimus, dGPU only (aka MUX). The former actually disables Nvidia GPU entirely. I might suspect power limiting with Throttlestop the CPU to low wattages might can get results really similar to U processors.
What i did to compromise was just turn on vsync in control panel, and off in games. Higher input is the only con, but i think its slight negated by the higher fps(higher fps=less dellay) i could be wrong on that but it makes sense to me.
I have a question that I haven't found an answer for, so I'd love to know your or anyone's thoughts. I've been switching between MSHybrid mode and dGPU mode daily on my laptop, both obviously for different situations requiring either the highest performance it can do, or the lowest possible battery consumption. I was just wondering if it was healthy for it, or if I am slowly corrupting it or something.. Cheers!
There should be no issue with that as long as you're happy to reboot to change it every time. I will have an Advanced Optimus video coming up next week which might interest you.
Thank you Jarrod for the video. Can you please make simple video about optimus disable using mux-switch vs external monitor. Did external monitor can give more fps or same using laptop display optimus disable.
@@DarrenKrusi that makes no sense really as the difference in performance is only impacted by the number of players in each team. If that is the case then the practice range fps values can be used
@@Supcharged tried Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Only tried the in game benchmark on both cases. Using the last gen Legion 5 with the RTX 2060.
Thank you for these 'Optimus Disabling' videos! I have an ASUS TUF FX705DT laptop, which is pretty good, but I can now see that Optimus is holding it back... So, I'll be buying the ASUS TUF VG24VQ monitor, which is curved, much bigger and brighter than the laptop display, has 144Hz refresh rate compared to the laptop's 60Hz and is highly customizable in terms of positioning. Hope that the FPS gains will be great! :D
I Got This Optimus Mode Option Yesterday After Updating Armoury Crate App On My Asus Laptop! I Was So Curious What That Mode Does, Thanks For The Video!
I have a 2019 base model. I’m pretty sure you can’t. But you can on the newest razer blades. I wouldn’t sweat about it, if you use gaming mode, the system overclocks the GPU and CPU, I think this makes up for optimus.
I know that in order to bypass optimus, the external display needs to connect to the discrete graphics, not the integrated ones. Is there a possibility that the external display will NOT connect to the discrete graphics, resulting in no performance boost?
Yes, it is possible. For example, Asus G17 has its HDMI port connected to the iGPU resulting in no boost performance. However, its USB Type-C port is connected to the dGPU, so in that case you would notice an improved performance when connecting an external monitor through it. As the previous comment said, it will depend on your laptop's particular model and configuration. You can check it in Nvidia's control panel.
In an older video on this channel i remember hearing that if your laptop gives you the option to disable optimus then the discrete GPU can work on its own and bypass the iGPU in heavy loads.
So basically to play modern games at 4K native, if I do decide to get the GT77 which pathetically lacks G-Sync and advanced optimus, I might as well leave optimus on and get the benefit of adaptive sync through intel driver from 48-144hz, as the FPS performance difference will be minimal in those kind of such GPU heavy games. This makes the GT77 more of a contender now, as I have been finding it very hard to get past MSI's cheapness in this regard. It's such a shame as such a great laptop otherwise. And unlike all the others, I never ever have to open it as it gets 4TB of SSD and 64Gb ram when bought from a certain big box retailer (at other stores 32Gb ram), whereas even with the $7500 Scar 18 I have to open it to add storage although at least it has 64Gb ram. However I care about no F key secondary lighting and lack of any kind of windows hello as every day ease of use helpers and Asus's cheapness on that front irks me just as much as MSI's cheapness re A-Optimus (Asus also has less usb ports). I care about G-sync but I also care about backlight bleed. If the GT77 simply had advanced optimus which they could even still add now with a bios unlock, it really would best overall of all worlds. I am so torn. If Asus offered proper key lighting for every single key and at least one form of windows hello, I'd get that. Furthermore, if they had a 17" model with mini LED so no backlight bleed, even better. Everything seems to be a compromise. I realise when I want to play retro games that the frame rate loss of optimus doesn't matter at all, and I'll benefit from the adaptive sync. That's great. But I want to be able to go from a AAA game to a retro game seamlessly, not worry about rebooting. Anyway I will give it a test and if I don't like it will return it, but I'm going to do a test of GT77 with 4090 with optimus on or off, FPS test in 3 modern AAA games and 2 AAA games from a few years ago, and see the difference. if anyone is interested in the results please let me know and I'll publish them and maybe expand to more games also.
So I will say that the cpu bottleneck can tank performance pretty hard if you are using a dual screen setup and are trying to run either a video or twitch steam on one screen and a game on the other. I've seen games that run smoothly at 60FPS all of the suddenly vary anywhere between 30 to 60 FPS which in turn causes the game game to stutter like a madman. I found that if I forced Chrome to use the Discrete NVIDIA GPU instead of the the AMD IGPU the bottleneck completely goes away and I can watch youtube or twitch while gaming. To be clear model I have has an RTX 3070 and uses the RYZEN 9 5900HX. I have not tested this with firefox or edge. But I do know that the bottleneck does exist for edge since it uses the software renderer which uses the CPU.
@@awsan111 Lenovo's Coldfront 3.0 Cooling System is so friggin good that it doesn't need a Vaporchamber. It can easily use both the CPU and GPU at full power without throttling or getting to warm. The vaporchamber and liquid metal thermal paste inside the G15 are wasted and just increase the cost because a shit ton of performance is lost due to the missing MUX-Switch.
I find that thing two years ago in my old netbook Asus eee PC, which have Intel atom and Nvidia ion (resolution 1366*768) When I launch portal 2 it was about 1 fps in main menu, but then I connect monitor and holy crap, game launch and work for about 20 fps I am really surprised to hear that works on so powerful notebooks with rtx 3080 and ryzen 7 Thx for video!
You can install custom drivers with no Optimus if you don’t need that battery life. I haven’t try it, but NVcleanstall comes with the option to select what features you want
I just don’t understand how this hasn’t been a standard feature for years. So much wasted performance without it. As someone who travels a lot it gets annoying carrying around a second display just to get full potential of my hardware.
Hey, thanks for the video! I wonder, those games, where optimus off and on, there is not a big diffrenece in fps. Is it because of the some bottlenack, that the game can not reach any more frames, or the game (or iGPU, lol?) is so well optimazed for the optimus?
Jarrod, please compare laptop and desktop 3060 and 3070! Nobody did this comparison so far. It would be great seeing you using Legion 5\5 pro for this comparison
@@siyzerix 3060 in Legion 5 would be like 5% behind actually, because it has more cores than the desktop 3060 while having high power limits in that laptop. 3070 as far as I've seen in benchmarks would be like 15-20% behind, which is surprising, I expected a bigger difference considering much lower power limits and less cores than on the desktop version. Still, direct apples to apples comparison is needed. And since Jarrod is one of few laptop reviewers who has desktop GPU-s in his disposal he'd be a perfect person to compare them.
@@TabalugaDragon I mean it'd also depend on how much voltage they use. I assume the desktop rtx 3060 can use higher voltage. So even if the clocks are the same, or even higher on the laptop, the laptop would loose by a bigger margin. I tested my 1050 at 2ghz at 1.012mV and it lost to the 1050 at 1936mhz at 1.060mV. It lost by like 7-10%. Albeit it was in 3 games only but I don't have many games. I assume the rtx 3070 would loose by a bigger margin maybe? I don't know.
@@siyzerix Perhaps your 2GHz was inconsistent, as it's extremely hard to reach such clockspeeds on a mobile 1050, mine goes up to 1850 Mhz max with max overclock, the rest is either unstable or the GPU doesn't get enough power and gets power limited. Laptop and desktop 1050 are exactly the same GPU-s with only exception of laptop 1050 being better binned.
Any particular reason you used the Legion 7? Is it beacuse of the slightly higher CPU workload with a Nvidia dGPU + Ryzen CPU resulting in more obvious improvements in gaming versus the Strix AE's Radeon dGPU or a Tiger Lake gaming laptop?
My msi ge63 don't have nvidia g sync But I'm using an external gaming monitor that supports G sync connecting with displayport ! How can I know I'm I disabled the Optimus or not .
Hey Jarrod´sTech I have a quick question, I bought a Msi g65 thin with a rtx 3060, and I can´t disable optimus, but what if I disable the integrated graphic from the BIOS or from the device administrator, would that work?
Is it the same if you switch from Optimus to Dedicated GPU in Nvidia control panel settings? Also does disabling optimus mean that the laptop will use the dedicated GPU even on battery, in every program?
all the option in the Nvidia control panel does is ensure the app you set to dedicated gpu always runs on the nvidia gpu, but it doesn't change how the display is physically wired. Nvidia gpu is only used for everything with optimus off, even when on battery.
Want to know if your laptop has Optimus? I've made this page covering every laptop I've tested and noting 'yes' or 'no' if it has Optimus: jarrods.tech/list-of-gaming-laptops-with-mux-switch/
you can disable igpu by shooting it with a handgun.
@@Joker-no1fz That will be disabling your laptop, I think some people won't like that, lol.
I think I found the american
@@Navinkumar-hn3nd *r/whooooosh*
What USB-C to display port cable do you use? I see you use an RGB one in a lot of your reviews
Plot twist: optimus prime was indeed the villain
Plot twist indeed
More like Optimus Primal
Damn. Those movies were fun to watch until the story got so bad that it's sad.
Jarrod should just be called THEE laptop guy at this point. When not reviewing laptops, he'll be giving useful tips to make the most out of your laptop.
Agreed. Hands down the most comprehensive and thought out reviews. Far better than LTT or Jayz2cents
Jarrod is amazing, but Dave2D is, and always will be the laptop guy
@@aardbeiwastaken (to you)
@@aardbeiwastaken Those two deserved the title. Jarrod is massively focused on technical practice and Dave is more keen to the experience and immersion.
@@aardbeiwastaken Absolutely false.
What are you on?
Dave2D doesn't care at all about performance.
He'll recommend a laptop just cause it looks nicer.
Absolutely 0 critical decision-making
Luckily ASUS has got our back by adding RGB🌈.
Steady +50% more fps with RGB on.
+300% with celeron 😎
Is that Sarcasm because I just bought an ASUS ROG Strix G15 and was wondering if that is true.
@@marsbars5941 it is a joke. To unlock the full performance on the g15 strix you will need a external monitor (it has no mux switch) . I returned mine. Got way to hot and it is under performing compared to the legion 5 line-up.
@@TechTyrial What kind of external monitor would you recommend?
@@marsbars5941 any 144hz 1440p/1080p ips panel whichever resolution u prefer
disablus optimus
Disablus india
@@slaydog5102 😂😂
sus
Optimus primus
disablus belajarus
I'm so happy I stumbled upon laptop review youtube channels, including this one for becoming enlightened about the issue of optimus and mux switches, the presence of the latter being a huge part of how I landed on the Legion 5 pro for my purchase this year. I don't know how I would have made nearly as informed of a purchase otherwise.
Awesome video detailing what Optimus is and how to work with/around it.
I wish I waited for the legions with rtx 30 series, but I got the aorus 15g xc with i7 10870h 32gb ram and rtx 3070 105w. It’s a great laptop, but the legion is superior. Also the power is on the right side on the aorus, but at least it has a mux.
Asus and their almost complete MUX-less line-up proves they really believed all-over-the-place RGB lightning was the go-to for improving FPS, I guess.
Of all the weird shit asus does, i can't blame them on this one. Dell has $4k laptops without mux, so does a lot of ultra high end laptop builders. Like the bad ram, I think manufacturers were blindsided on how big of a performance hit this caused, both figured out by jarrods tech afaik. My man needs consulting bonuses from companies lol.
We all know that RGB equals 50% more fps
@@TechTyrial 69%
@@LeFatalpotato the Dell X17 has display options with Advanced Optimus. Asus offers exactly *one* model with a mux switch and that is the S17, and not even on all display options.
The S17 has advanced optimus, which is better than MUX. Don't worry too much, I'm sure future models would have them. They will all jump on that trend
Its good to see that you post a update video about this difference in performance every year
Gives a good idea of how much does improved hardware gets affected without mux
Please don’t stop doing this anytime soon, by FAR my favorite laptop reviewer ever!
Jarrod is like the only well established youtuber who talks about laptops. Big up
Whenever I need answer to my question about laptops, Jarrod is here to save the day. Thank you for for helping us.
Dude, thank you so much for this video! I would have never known why my 3080 laptop felt kind of sluggish compared to benchmarks of other 3080 laptops. I decided to hook up my external monitor and instantly I went from about 70-80fps in Warzone (100 if I was lucky) to never dipping below 110. Averaging 120-140. I didn't think it would actually be that much but that's pretty insane.
Glad I could help!
Sucks that they make you deal with Optimus and you can’t even turn it off unless you spend extra money on a monitor. So annoying
Brilliant review as always Jarrod, the detail and information you put into these videos are above excellent. Keep up the work mate
I can tell Jarrod is still working on reviews but wants to upload useful vids lol
On my old Dell Precision laptops I noticed turning off optimus (or whatever it was called before it was optimus) that it not only gave a small performance boost, but even more importantly a massive response time boost. With it on, racing or fps games were so laggy they were essentially unplayable. I also noticed screen tearing was drastically better with optimus off. This was with some pretty low end gpus though, old radeon and kepler quadro stuff.
@Dragon Rip I had a Precision M6800, and there was a setting in BIOS called switchable graphics. You want that off. Only works if there is a discrete GPU installed.
I don’t understand why because the mux switch was advertised to do the exact opposite
So I have the Legion 5i 2060 model(with the 115w bios swap) and I recently installed Far Cry 6. Ultra setting 80-100 fps(1080p)... brilliant!... however the microstutter every few seconds was unbearable...
Disabling Optimus and the microstutter is completely GONE.
Also higher FPS across the board. Crazy the power you can get out of these laptops with a couple tweaks! Cheers.
R.I.P. Alexi Laiho
Bought and promptly refunded wd:Legion because of the microstutters. How were you able to achieve this? Did you just turn off hybrid mode in Lenovo Vantage?
I'm hoping to eliminate microstutters on my Legion 5 3060. Because it's very noticeable especially at high framerates
@@k7880 Yeah turn off hybrid mode in vantage, system will want to restart.
I couldn't believe the difference it made.
Only downside is it will use battery faster when unplugged but its easily enabled again if you need more battery life.
I don't have any option about Optimus in my PC but I plugged in an external monitor and it absolutely helps
I have NEVER seen 7.5hrs of youtube playback with my Legion 5 Pro. 3.5hrs MAX with all battery saver options on. How on earth did you manage 7.5hrs?
Make sure you tune your CPU settings, Nvidia Control Panel settings as well as windows settings. This can reduce the power consumption both on GPU and CPU. Hope this helps :)
@@opness5275 I did all sorts of experiments and managed to see the battery pointing to the 7++ hr mark, but it's very inconsistent. As soon as I start doing anything different than reading a text doc (f.x. youtube at 720p) hours cut in half.
Never take these reviews seriously.. you can watch it for reference and to get some idea about the product but don't rely completely on it .. as the unit THEY receive is better in certain aspects (i think so).. also Jerrod literally knows everything about laptops so he knows what settings to change and how to get maximum battery time ... It might not be possible for us to know Everything in that much detailed ..we might not even know some settings as we are obviously not as invested in laptops as he is.
So just take these RUclips reviews for reference .. don't take it as 100% true.
Jarrod mann really thanks for your videos
I really love your work and its all just perfect for deciding and chose laptops
Amazing work, I hope u continue this and bring us review of more and more laptops
🌻
Glad you like them!
Hell of a pressure on the companies that don't add Optimus in their laptop, a huge "Buyer be aware"
I really love seeing this after ordering a laptop without a MUX switch. To be fair, the price was so good that I can't really complain. Plus, I don't think the CPU is going to be bottlenecking the GPU, so hopefully the performance hit wont be too bad
Hp victus??
@@vivektheking2725 I had ordered the Gigabyte Aorus 15p, but I now have a legion 5 pro due to other issues from the 15p
@@TyTystick I’m considering buying Aorus 15 xe4, could you please tell me what issues did you experience?
I dont know man I dont think Optimus Prime deserves to be in a wheel chair
Nicce
He deserves it for all those times he summoned a trailer from mid air. He’s a witch!!
There is sometimes one problem with external monitor on laptops without optimus - if laptop lid is open everyting is fine on external, but when the lid is closed games stutter and only option to solve this is disabling integrated gpu in device manager which sometimes causes another problem - no more sleep option :D This problem exists for years already and seems to be windows+nvidia+intel fault.
Informative video, however, I feel that this should have been tested with an entry level GPU, such as the 3050 or the 3050 Ti, where you could actually take advantage of this clever feature. It's difficult to say if the results would be similar percentagewise, but I'd assume so.
This gives newer computers with entry level cards with this feature a bit of an edge when compared to older laptops with a 2060 or 1650 etc.
When is the review of the dell g15 5515 coming? I really wanna see how the midrange dell laptop performs. Twas even available for $1077 few days ago on dell website.
I guess this is gonna be a yearly series.
Honestly I just thought the older video was garbage compared to my newer standard of production quality and I also thought I could explain the topic a lot clearer. But yeah it might be interesting to see how much future iGPUs limit, if advanced optimus or similar becomes easy to implement there may be no need.
very informative video thanks for great content,you manage to make this easy to understand :)
Glad it was helpful!
It should be mandatory to have a gpu mux on any laptop marketed as gamer.
some shithead will complain about battery life, buying gaming laptop and wants longer BL lol
I am not that worried about getting more fps on my games , i just want to know which mode is best for the longevity of my laptop as for me personally it doesnt make much difference between 70-90 fps
I know it's been two years, but I'll leave this here for anyone who stumbles upon the comment.
For longevity, whether you use optimus or not doesn't really make a difference. Both the CPU and GPU are going to last just as long, independently of which you choose. The battery longevity could be affected if the laptop isn't plugged in though. With optimus off, when you're just using the GPU, it drains the battery much faster. If you use the laptop while it isn't plugged in often, you probably want optimus on. You shouldn't be gaming or doing any resource intensive tasks without it plugged in, so you don't really need the extra performance from the GPU. Obviously if the battery is quickly draining and being recharged constantly, that could impact the longevity of the battery.
Long story short, no, don't worry too much about the longevity of the laptop. Assuming you're doing all the required maintenance, it will be fine. The only real concern could be the battery if the laptop is often used while not plugged in over a long period of time, in which case I would refer you to your battery settings. Usually there are options to limit the amount of charge the battery can hold to help protect it in the long run.
@@Beanpolr I appreciate the response man thanks, as a quick question can you give me a list of all the required maintenance you mentioned, just for cross checking
In general i try to keep battery levels between 30 and 90%, dont leave it without charge, game on battery and all
Longevity is important to me due to being a broke college student , really needed a laptop to last me 4 years atleast till i can earn money, it has being going strong for 2 years now though :)
@@pranavchopra_0075 For maintenance, the biggest thing is to monitor the performance and temperatures, especially when gaming. That'll alert you pretty early if something is starting to go wrong or become less efficient for some reason.
As for actual maintenance tasks, the most important thing with a laptop is make sure the fans are clean and cleared, along with the heatsink. You can open up most laptops and clean dust and debris from the fans, but oftentimes it will also build up further in where you cannot see. In those cases sometimes you might have to send it to someone to fully clean, as it's not always easy to access certain internals. Depending on your environment, I would probably at least try to clear the fans out once every couple months. To prevent buildup I wouldn't use it in bed, or in areas with a lot of dust (so if possible keep it away from areas pets frequent).
The fans are the most important thing, as airflow is what cools your components and stops them from melting themselves. Other than that, make sure all your software is kept up to date as much as possible, that way the possible causes of issues are narrowed down if they arise.
You could also look into replacing the thermal paste, but that doesn't have to be done regularly. If you've had it for a couple years it might be worth doing. That shouldn't be a big issue though, most laptops are good as far as that goes.
Other than that, you should be fine. If everything is working good, don't worry about it. Sounds like you're doing your best to take care of it. I wouldn't be worried unless you notice some unusual behavior or reductions in performance.
@@Beanpolrthank you 👍
thank u jarrod this info really helped my legion 7i gaming laptop so big thanks 👍
I watched so many of your vids. You're awesome. Thank you for all these reviews and tech content
My pleasure!
ROG logo and RGB gives more fps than disabling optimus.
Ty for another brilliant video Jarrod! I bought this very same beauty and I'm wondering is it worth it to have optimus disabled if you're also gonna be doing work and browsing? Does disabling optimus have a negative impact in workloads like Adobe CC or Blender that outweights hindering a little the gaming performance? (laptop always plugged in)
Hey cool video, do you still see this difference with lower teir gpus? Is any difference in a lower teir gpu worth looking for the ability to disable optimus?
Amazing video, thanks for the information 😉
Optimus Enabled: “Autobots,Roll out!”
Optimus Disabled: “Until I return I’m leaving you in command. I know you won’t let me down.”
hey Jarrod I'm waiting to see your review of Alienware x17 r1 with 3080 and 360hz screen! Should I expect that soon?
X1 R1 with:
-i7 since the i9 gets too hot
-RTX 3080 for the 165W TGP
-32GB atleast since the 16GB version uses high density sticks
-1080p 360Hz screen for the best gaming experience (wish they had a QHD version)
I have to disagree on the i9. Adjusted the fan curves, undervolted and it ran at 80-88°C under full load and at max 93°C with an overclock
Thank goodness, I just ordered the Legion 7. Very good to know this info.
You continue to teach me many small things about my laptop that I always overlook until I wonder why it happens. Thank you @Jarrod'sTech
Would it be possible to use a "dummy plug" to fool the laptop in to thinking there is an external monitor, yet get the benefits of Optimus disabled using the laptop's screen?
Thanks for a good explanation of Optimus. And all your hard work testing products for us.
There won't be any "dummy plug". Because the laptop screen is wired to onboard graphic (intel uhd/ amd vega), then the onboard graphic to the GPU. It is no way for the laptop screen to bypass the onboard graphic (with only optimus). In contrast, the hdmi, usb c(display port) are usually wired directly to the GPU so that's why it bypass the optimus system.
I thought it was a hidden thing to double FPS on my 2012 i5 Laptop
I run my GH14 with an external display, and the performance improvements are very obvious.
I am also satisfied with disabling Optimus in hp omen 15 rtx 2060 tdp 100watt;))) I play in 1440p on External monitor man;)))
Very instructive video, I used to think that it was the opposite and that the bottleneck happened when you connected the laptop to an external display.
what was the computer in video?
So, it's time to get an external monitor I see.
Hey Jarrod, now that you have the Legion laptops, will you test the effect of asynchronous dual channel ram on games and creative workloads (video editing, 3D rendering, etc.)?
I haven't forgotten about it. I actually made this video about a month ago and haven't had the Legion 7 in ages, but I did recently buy the newest 5, so once the reviews are done I'll probably use that. It's going to be like a solid week testing just for one video which is why it keeps getting put off.
Ah I see. Take all the time you need. I’d rather wait and watch a well tested video than watch a rushed video right away.
@@JarrodsTech you need to do comprehensive 7 vs 7i both with 3080 and good ram when the 7i comes out!
I have mshybrid instead of Optimus and when I launch a game my igpu usage lowers to 0% so is it like gsync?
Hey Jarrod, are you going to re-review old 3000 series laptops but now have 11th gen intel cpus? I'm looking for something as a backup option to the legion 5 pro because of their availability and would really like to know how good the 11800h AERO 15 is. keep up the great vids!
Genuine question. Have you ever taken a non-U processor and turned the power limits to U levels to see if it brings battery levels up to U levels?
Considering U processor laptops come with much smaller batteries there is no real way to do a fair comparison. But most of those laptops get 6-8 hours of battery life. Sometimes more depending on the use case. And the Lenovo 7 in this video can get those level of battery use with optimus on by just having a larger battery. So if it had a U level processor it would have much better battery life.
That would make a cool experiment, I had an i7 8750h gtx 1060 laptop that lasted on battery no longer than 1 hour (not playing just browsing the web or doing some word) and when I was outside I used to turn down the tdp to 20 watts for boost and it did the trick, really got at least 3 hours of battery out of it, the problem was that the frequency also suffered very very much, specially the boost clock for single core couldn't reach anything beyond 2.9ghz (from 4.1 on the normal tdp) so it became a weird experience, U CPUs on the other hand are designed to reach better boost clocks with those lower tdps, but that was on an Intel chip, pretty sure an AMD one will do better, I'll update this comment in two weeks when my Ryzen laptop arrives
@Vikas Dewangan It depends. My gaming laptop has a 3 way Switchable Graphics: iGPU only, Nvidia Optimus, dGPU only (aka MUX). The former actually disables Nvidia GPU entirely. I might suspect power limiting with Throttlestop the CPU to low wattages might can get results really similar to U processors.
So for non-gaming use optimus and for games turn it off?
Yeah
Proper content as always 🔥
Being waiting for this video from you for 1y now
In many laptops, disabling Optimus also disables Variable Refresh Rate, so you may get more frames, but they would feel worse.
That’s why you look for laptops with Gsync displays.
What i did to compromise was just turn on vsync in control panel, and off in games. Higher input is the only con, but i think its slight negated by the higher fps(higher fps=less dellay) i could be wrong on that but it makes sense to me.
I have a question that I haven't found an answer for, so I'd love to know your or anyone's thoughts. I've been switching between MSHybrid mode and dGPU mode daily on my laptop, both obviously for different situations requiring either the highest performance it can do, or the lowest possible battery consumption.
I was just wondering if it was healthy for it, or if I am slowly corrupting it or something..
Cheers!
There should be no issue with that as long as you're happy to reboot to change it every time. I will have an Advanced Optimus video coming up next week which might interest you.
I also use legion and I didnt even know this. Thanks Jarrod
but why does windows use the on board gephic card for the notebook monitor?? isnt it bad???
Thank you Jarrod for the video. Can you please make simple video about optimus disable using mux-switch vs external monitor. Did external monitor can give more fps or same using laptop display optimus disable.
Yeah I used to have a laptop with a 2070 but I got a legion with 2060 and it performs better than the 2070 because of optimus
Wait is it the legion y540 because I just ordered one and its arriving today
@@Emma_madison Yes legion y540 does have optimus
@@Emma_madison nah legion 5i but my brother has the y540 and it runs the same with same specs
Shoutout to @Bob Of All Trades he's been teaching stuff like these and endorsing muxed laptops for years now.
Will connecting my laptop to a 4k tv also bypass optimus and provide the performance benefit?
I wish someone tested escape from tarkov with and without a mux switch
Bro fr, tarkov is such a horrendous game to run on a decent gaming laptop.
Hey Jarrod, can you include Valorant in your testing too ?
Seconded!
It's too inconsistent because it's an online game. Every game he uses is one he can use the same scenario in all reviews.
@@DarrenKrusi that makes no sense really as the difference in performance is only impacted by the number of players in each team. If that is the case then the practice range fps values can be used
you helped me soo much with buying a new laptop u cannnot even imagine
Hey, Jarrod. Any difference regarding thermal with optimus enabled/disabled?
no it’s the same
This is fantastic. You’ve just given me free FPS.
You aint lying
But can’t seem to find any difference in FPS in my own tests.
@@Prince_Pig what laptop and what games?
@@Supcharged tried Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Only tried the in game benchmark on both cases. Using the last gen Legion 5 with the RTX 2060.
@@Prince_Pig Really? SotTR was one game Jarrod found big gains
Thank you for these 'Optimus Disabling' videos! I have an ASUS TUF FX705DT laptop, which is pretty good, but I can now see that Optimus is holding it back...
So, I'll be buying the ASUS TUF VG24VQ monitor, which is curved, much bigger and brighter than the laptop display, has 144Hz refresh rate compared to the laptop's 60Hz and is highly customizable in terms of positioning.
Hope that the FPS gains will be great! :D
I Got This Optimus Mode Option Yesterday After Updating Armoury Crate App On My Asus Laptop! I Was So Curious What That Mode Does, Thanks For The Video!
Your shirt is awesome! also thanks for the info!
My laptop's optimus is permanently disabled, using the dGPU all the time, good thing is battery life is not much of a big deal for me
How did u do it?
@@Pxblz it was like that out of the box, must be permanent since I didn't find any way to enable it
Can I disable optimize on 2019 Razer blade 15?
I have a 2019 base model. I’m pretty sure you can’t. But you can on the newest razer blades. I wouldn’t sweat about it, if you use gaming mode, the system overclocks the GPU and CPU, I think this makes up for optimus.
So I'm confused. Turning off hybrid disables optimus? Should i leave hybrid off for better performance?
Uhhh was waiting on the alternate way to disable Optimus, went straight to game benchmarks.
It varies laptop to laptop. I have written about how to disable Optimus here:
jarrods.tech/how-to-turn-off-optimus-on-your-gaming-laptop/
I know that in order to bypass optimus, the external display needs to connect to the discrete graphics, not the integrated ones. Is there a possibility that the external display will NOT connect to the discrete graphics, resulting in no performance boost?
You can check that in your nvidia graphics properties. It will show whether the hdmi is connected to the gpu directly or not.
Yes, it is possible. For example, Asus G17 has its HDMI port connected to the iGPU resulting in no boost performance. However, its USB Type-C port is connected to the dGPU, so in that case you would notice an improved performance when connecting an external monitor through it.
As the previous comment said, it will depend on your laptop's particular model and configuration. You can check it in Nvidia's control panel.
Yes exactly, but your thunderbolt port is always iGPU. So you could just use this.
In an older video on this channel i remember hearing that if your laptop gives you the option to disable optimus then the discrete GPU can work on its own and bypass the iGPU in heavy loads.
So basically to play modern games at 4K native, if I do decide to get the GT77 which pathetically lacks G-Sync and advanced optimus, I might as well leave optimus on and get the benefit of adaptive sync through intel driver from 48-144hz, as the FPS performance difference will be minimal in those kind of such GPU heavy games. This makes the GT77 more of a contender now, as I have been finding it very hard to get past MSI's cheapness in this regard. It's such a shame as such a great laptop otherwise.
And unlike all the others, I never ever have to open it as it gets 4TB of SSD and 64Gb ram when bought from a certain big box retailer (at other stores 32Gb ram), whereas even with the $7500 Scar 18 I have to open it to add storage although at least it has 64Gb ram. However I care about no F key secondary lighting and lack of any kind of windows hello as every day ease of use helpers and Asus's cheapness on that front irks me just as much as MSI's cheapness re A-Optimus (Asus also has less usb ports).
I care about G-sync but I also care about backlight bleed. If the GT77 simply had advanced optimus which they could even still add now with a bios unlock, it really would best overall of all worlds. I am so torn. If Asus offered proper key lighting for every single key and at least one form of windows hello, I'd get that. Furthermore, if they had a 17" model with mini LED so no backlight bleed, even better. Everything seems to be a compromise.
I realise when I want to play retro games that the frame rate loss of optimus doesn't matter at all, and I'll benefit from the adaptive sync. That's great. But I want to be able to go from a AAA game to a retro game seamlessly, not worry about rebooting.
Anyway I will give it a test and if I don't like it will return it, but I'm going to do a test of GT77 with 4090 with optimus on or off, FPS test in 3 modern AAA games and 2 AAA games from a few years ago, and see the difference. if anyone is interested in the results please let me know and I'll publish them and maybe expand to more games also.
So I will say that the cpu bottleneck can tank performance pretty hard if you are using a dual screen setup and are trying to run either a video or twitch steam on one screen and a game on the other. I've seen games that run smoothly at 60FPS all of the suddenly vary anywhere between 30 to 60 FPS which in turn causes the game game to stutter like a madman. I found that if I forced Chrome to use the Discrete NVIDIA GPU instead of the the AMD IGPU the bottleneck completely goes away and I can watch youtube or twitch while gaming. To be clear model I have has an RTX 3070 and uses the RYZEN 9 5900HX. I have not tested this with firefox or edge. But I do know that the bottleneck does exist for edge since it uses the software renderer which uses the CPU.
Will keep crying until we get a G15 advantage with a mux and better ram
okay
I'd rather have a Legion 5 Pro Advantage Edition with 6800M
@@CaptainChrom not a bad idea, but the vapor chamber cooling and Liquid metal are kinda what made it for me
@@awsan111 Lenovo's Coldfront 3.0 Cooling System is so friggin good that it doesn't need a Vaporchamber. It can easily use both the CPU and GPU at full power without throttling or getting to warm.
The vaporchamber and liquid metal thermal paste inside the G15 are wasted and just increase the cost because a shit ton of performance is lost due to the missing MUX-Switch.
@@CaptainChrom wont disagree, Love the legion line, using it as we speak.
But seeing the G15 max at under 80c at full loud is beautiful
Hey Jarrod will you be reviewing the legion 7i when it comes out? Or is it just too similar of a laptop to the legion 7 ryzen model to review?
I’m sure he will. It will be a great part 2 with Tiger lake vs Cezanne this time with a 3080 max p.
I plan on reviewing it when I am able to get a hold of one.
I see you're a man of culture as well (CoB t-shirt)
Killing it with the Childern of Bodom t-shirt 🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘
childern of bodom - decadence is one hell of a metal song intro.
🤘🤘
So if we’ll never be gaming on battery might as well disable Optimus permanently?
Does changing the nvidia physx configuration setting from auto to your dedicated gpu disable optimus?
Thanks Jarrod I wanted an amd ryzen laptop comparison with and and without monitor and u did it
Especially csgo
I find that thing two years ago in my old netbook Asus eee PC, which have Intel atom and Nvidia ion (resolution 1366*768)
When I launch portal 2 it was about 1 fps in main menu, but then I connect monitor and holy crap, game launch and work for about 20 fps
I am really surprised to hear that works on so powerful notebooks with rtx 3080 and ryzen 7
Thx for video!
You can install custom drivers with no Optimus if you don’t need that battery life. I haven’t try it, but NVcleanstall comes with the option to select what features you want
I just don’t understand how this hasn’t been a standard feature for years. So much wasted performance without it. As someone who travels a lot it gets annoying carrying around a second display just to get full potential of my hardware.
Hey, thanks for the video!
I wonder, those games, where optimus off and on, there is not a big diffrenece in fps. Is it because of the some bottlenack, that the game can not reach any more frames, or the game (or iGPU, lol?) is so well optimazed for the optimus?
Jarrod, please compare laptop and desktop 3060 and 3070! Nobody did this comparison so far. It would be great seeing you using Legion 5\5 pro for this comparison
3070 would loose badly. 3060 might loose by like 10%
@@siyzerix 3060 in Legion 5 would be like 5% behind actually, because it has more cores than the desktop 3060 while having high power limits in that laptop.
3070 as far as I've seen in benchmarks would be like 15-20% behind, which is surprising, I expected a bigger difference considering much lower power limits and less cores than on the desktop version. Still, direct apples to apples comparison is needed.
And since Jarrod is one of few laptop reviewers who has desktop GPU-s in his disposal he'd be a perfect person to compare them.
@@TabalugaDragon I mean it'd also depend on how much voltage they use. I assume the desktop rtx 3060 can use higher voltage. So even if the clocks are the same, or even higher on the laptop, the laptop would loose by a bigger margin.
I tested my 1050 at 2ghz at 1.012mV and it lost to the 1050 at 1936mhz at 1.060mV. It lost by like 7-10%. Albeit it was in 3 games only but I don't have many games.
I assume the rtx 3070 would loose by a bigger margin maybe? I don't know.
@@siyzerix Perhaps your 2GHz was inconsistent, as it's extremely hard to reach such clockspeeds on a mobile 1050, mine goes up to 1850 Mhz max with max overclock, the rest is either unstable or the GPU doesn't get enough power and gets power limited.
Laptop and desktop 1050 are exactly the same GPU-s with only exception of laptop 1050 being better binned.
Does a mux switch or advance Optimus, make any difference for VR headsets, that are plugged into a usb a, usbc, display port, or though wireless wifi?
Any particular reason you used the Legion 7? Is it beacuse of the slightly higher CPU workload with a Nvidia dGPU + Ryzen CPU resulting in more obvious improvements in gaming versus the Strix AE's Radeon dGPU or a Tiger Lake gaming laptop?
gonna watch it later, might helps boost my laptop
My msi ge63 don't have nvidia g sync
But I'm using an external gaming monitor that supports G sync connecting with displayport ! How can I know I'm I disabled the Optimus or not .
2:11 shows that GPU is directly connected to the external monitor bypassing optimus.
Hey Jarrod´sTech I have a quick question, I bought a Msi g65 thin with a rtx 3060, and I can´t disable optimus, but what if I disable the integrated graphic from the BIOS or from the device administrator, would that work?
I would love to know if the difference also exists in the content creation programs
Is it the same if you switch from Optimus to Dedicated GPU in Nvidia control panel settings?
Also does disabling optimus mean that the laptop will use the dedicated GPU even on battery, in every program?
all the option in the Nvidia control panel does is ensure the app you set to dedicated gpu always runs on the nvidia gpu, but it doesn't change how the display is physically wired.
Nvidia gpu is only used for everything with optimus off, even when on battery.
Was there any change in CPU/GPU temperatures as well?
fam ur channel god tier but when u judged the Nitro 5 that i have i couldnt believe what i hear
So if we connect the laptop to a external display and put it in Duplicate mode of projection will we get different fps on different screens?
I want to buy a Asus G733QR with RTX3070 or MSI GE76 Raider but I think I should go for the raider because of the MUX
Hey Jarrod. When is the review for lenovo legion 5 rtx 3060 or 3070 coming? I am desperately waiting for that 😀
Yes, I really want him to cover this topic.