Which to keep - Desktop or Laptop? [and confusion about benchmark tests]

[samuelthomson]

I've recently been given a laptop by my employer, and I now have 3 PCs, which is more than I need. I feel like I should retain a personal computer alongside the one from work, but I don't know which, or whether I should sell both and buy something else. I ran some benchmark tests with slightly mixed results, which hasn't helped my decisiveness!

PCs

- an early Threadripper Desktop PC that I had built in 2018
- a Lenovo Legion Pro laptop that I bought in 2024
- work laptop that's very similar spec to the personal laptop I have (ignored below, I just thought it was worth mentioning)

Tests

1. I work with Unreal a lot, and the first thing I tried was the Unreal "Electric Dreams" demo, which shows off a big level in Unreal with lots of foliage. It runs at a reasonable (but not great) framerate on both the desktop and the laptop.
2. I then ran some other benchmark tests - first Passmark, which gave a weird result for DX12 on the laptop, but generally suggested the laptop was faster, with the exception of 3D graphics.
3. I then also ran the 3DMark demo, which gave the Desktop PC a significantly better overall score than the Lenovo Laptop when rendering a 3D scene.

Conclusions

What would you do in this situation? It feels like a waste to hang on to both the laptop and the desktop as one is always going to be on the shelf. I could sell one and get a better graphics card for the other, but there are probably other bottlenecks in each. Or I could sell both and buy something new, but probably it wouldn't be amazingly high-spec as their combined value is maybe £1800 max. I also don't know what the longevity is like on a 7-year old threadripper vs a 1-year old Legion Pro.

[Full PC Spec]

Threadripper PC Bought in 2018:

Processor: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X 16 Core CPU (3.5GHz - 4.4GHz, 40MB CACHE)
Motherboard: ASUS® ROG STRIX X399-E
Memory: 128GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 2933MHz ~ (8 x 16GB)
Graphics Card: 11GB ASUS ROG STRIX GEFORCE RTX 2080 Ti - HDMI, DP
SSD: 1TB SAMSUNG 970 EVO PLUS M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3500MB/R, 3300MB/W)

Lenovo Legion Pro 5i Gen9, bought in Dec 2024:

Processor: 14th Generation Intel® Core™ i9-14900HX Processor (E-cores up to 4.10 GHz P-cores up to 5.80 GHz)
Motherboard: [Not sure, probably...] 83DF?
Memory: 32 GB DDR5-5600MHz (SODIMM) - (2 x 16 GB)
Graphic Card: NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 4070 Laptop GPU 8GB GDDR6
SSD: 1 TB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4 TLC

HP Laptop from work
Basically HP laptop with similar spec to the Lenovo laptop, although not as good at running the Unreal "Electric Dreams" demo. higher scores on benchmarks, though!

 

[Tetras]

As mentioned, I'm confused because these seem like very mixed results.

I'm not particularly familiar with either threadripper systems or laptops, but I'd expect some level of inconsistency for those PCs because of the age difference and the platforms. Your threadripper has a lot of cores, which are good for multithreading, but the single core speed isn't so good (common with these type of CPUs) and that will let it down on shorter timeframe/bursty workloads or in games.

The Intel system has a lot of raw power, but laptops can easily get throttled after much work is done, which can limit to what degree that power is realisable.

I don't know about Unreal specifically, since if it uses certain extensions (like AVX), is more single or multithreaded, or if it has ray tracing, that's going to change the results too.