Item — HN Reader

I suspect the throttling behavior has to more do with the power settings used during testing or OEM tuning on specific models.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymoiWv9BF7Q

In this video, they show the perf/watt curves at 8:30. And they show the on-battery vs on-wall performance at 18:35 across a wide variety of benchmarks, not just Geekbench. They used a Lenovo YOGA Air 15 on Window 11's "Balanced" power plan for their tests. The narrator specifically noted the Macbook-like on-battery performance.

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Reviewers always use max performance setting for benchmarks and then max battery life for battery tests. That's how people get tricked. When they actually buy the laptop and use it for themselves, they complain that it's slow when on battery life or hot/loud when plugged in.

They're not trying to trick you. In fact when they were measuring perf/watt, the Lunar Lake chip was disadvantaged against the Apple M-series because they had to run the SPEC 2017 tests on Ubuntu for the Lunar Lake chip, which has poorer tuning for it compared to Windows 11. You can see a footnote saying the compilation environment was Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on the bottom left corner of the frame when they show the perf/watt graphs.

They are trying to trick you. All reviewers are told by Intel to run benchmarks in max performance mode and battery either in balanced or max efficiency mode. These modes will throttle. So the performance you're seeing in reviews aren't achievable in battery mode unless you're ok with drastically lower battery life.

Meanwhile, PCWorld is one of the few that actually ran benchmarks while on battery life - which is what people will experience.