Those benchmarks CAN'T BE RIGHT - Intel 11th Gen Tuxedo Stellaris 15

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00:00 Intro
01:38 Specs and Build Quality
06:07 Performance and Battery Life
10:58 Slimbook Titan or Stellaris 15?

## The laptop

So, the Tuxedo Stellaris 15 is, obviously, 15 inch laptop. It weighs 2.2kg, battery included, and it's probably the highest end laptop Tuxedo offers these days, at least for anything requiring some serious horsepower.

My review unit came with 16Gb of RAM, as well as an Nvidia Geforce RTX 3070, as well as 256GB of SSD.

THe display is one of the major focus point of this laptop: it's a 3K panel, at 2560x1440p, running at 165hz. It's got amazing viewing angles, really good color accuracy, and seeing as this laptop is definitely made for creatives or gamers, it's a fantastic display.

The chassis itself is the same as what the SLimbook Titan uses: fully made out of black aluminium, except for the bottom plate, which is removeable and lets you access the RAM, the SSD as well as the battery, that you can upgrade and replace.

Tuxedo's branding is more subtle than the one on the Slimbook Titan, with a black TUxedo logo on the back, slightly raised, and that's it. No big logo underneath the screen, which is definitely a good thing, and no stickers on the chassis either.

We also find here the excellent opto-mechanical keyboard: a mechanical board that uses light instead of switches to actuate the keys.

The touchpad is really good as well, made out of glass, super smooth, very reactive, and large enough to be comfortable. Definitely a good touchpad as far a laptops preinstalled with Linux go.

You get a USB 3.1 gen 2 port, an audio and a microphone jack on the left side, as well as a full size SD card reader and 2 USB 3.1 ports on the right side. On the back, you have a thunderbolt 4 port, since I went with the intel option, with video out for up to 2 4K displays, an HDMI 2.1 port, a gigabit ethernet jack, and the barrel charger on the back.

## Performance

Ok, so here is where the laptop really diverges from the Slimbook Titan I reviewed. The Tuxedo Stellaris 15 I got has an intel Core i7 11800H, which is an 8 core, 16 threads CPU, that can go up to 4.6Ghz, with a base clock of 2.3Ghz, slightly lower than the base clock of the Ryzen 9 5900HX I reviewed on the SLimbook Titan, but with 24Mb of L3 cache, versus the 16 of the ryzen option.

Both CPUs have the same 45W TDP, so let's see how they compare.

The Core i7 on the Stellaris 15 got a single core score of **1669**, and a multi core score of **8487**, when in "max performance" mode.

This is surprisingly higher than the scores for the Ryzen 9 5900HX I tried on the Slimbook Titan, which got 1511 in single core, and 8170 in multi core. That's about a 10% improvement in single core, and 4% in multi core.

So, basically, these 11th Gen CPUs get a 20 to 50% performance edge, on these 3 games at least, compared to the Ryzen 9 5900HX. That is super surprising to me, especially considering that the intel CPUs should have a lower base clock, and the geekbench scores don't really reflect that kind of difference. I have to believe that this is due to some performance profile that wasn't enabled on the Slimbook Titan, these CPUs shouldn't result in such massive differences.

On the intel device, you don't get that problem, and running the laptop without using the Nvidia dedicated GPU at all, with 50% screen brightness, I got 7 hours, just watching youtube videos on a loop in Firefox.

[ClaudeHomml]

20% performance difference sounds like the memory problem a lot of reviewers are talking about. A lot of laptops now ship with slow ram modules with a significant loss in especially gaming performance.

[codewithshriekdj]

thank god your youtube channel is back online

[DavidBonelo]

I recommend watching the LTT's playlist *Buying A Gaming Laptop in 2021 is Way More Difficult Than it Should Be*

[samparksharma]

Hey, you said barrel charger is bad, but it has to have it, as usb c allows max 100W power delivery and this laptop in full tilt would be taking more power cpu + gpu combined.

[kurapikakurta]

This is why I love having more than one company selling a product. There's competition. When there's competition there's bound to be some improvements. I don't want to go back to the time when Intel had a monopoly on the CPU market.

[igorzkoppt]

I actually consider the barrel power port as a big plus.

- The USB-C ports and plugs are really flimsy. My 2017 laptop USB-C charger port is already getting a bit loose.... I really don't like the idea of 60 to 80w going through there.
- Since the USB port used for power can also be used for transferring data, you get a high power line just millimetres away from a data line... Conductive dirt, dust, or liquid accidents do happen.
- If broken, a barrel plug is super-easy to replace

There is a good reason why power ports on standard appliances are generally beefy (until the USB-C though). In my opinion, it's a bad case of marketing taking over design.

[Psychx_]

Are the Ryzen CPUs using schedutil? There was a bug that cost a lot of performance with older kernels. Try using ondemand for testing except when using Kernel 5.13 or newer.

[penguinbitals]

About type-c charging. I use a Mouse laptop with it, it's about 2 years old, and I've already had to replace the charging port. Provided they have a non-standard soldering layout I couldn't find a compatible one yet, so I used another one from the same machine as I didn't need it much. TLDR: the barrel plug is less convenient, true, but way more reliable.

[mweisshaupt]

I have used two laptops with USB-C style power delivery and honestly I'm a bit dissapointed in that connection. After some months there was significant wobble on both machines. I just bought a Slimbook Pro X AMD and it has both options but I'll definately go with the old power delivery connection since I never had problems like this with it. The best solution IMHO is on the old Macs with the magnet connection but I believe they got rid on it on the newer machines.

[pupperemeritus]

i'd recommend manually keeping an eye on temps, power draw and clock speeds. use tools like green with envy and corectrl to keep coreclocks of gpus pegged at base/boost. also manually set the fan curves and power limits. 11800h and 5900hx are supposed to be on par at 70-80+w power range and under 65 amd performs better.

[mr.anirbangoswami]

Glad to have your videos back, man. Definitely would look into getting my hands on a stellaris if I gather enough money. The subtle branding and the other advantages are really nice

[BraxtonMeyer]

You should be checking the power draw of the Intel laptop vs the ryzen laptop. This is probably the issue

[jerryferreira]

Love your shirt, and you make it look good!

[alepharcane]

the USB-C has a power limit (100W) that just isnt enough for the power hungry GPUs. So, proprietary charging ports are inevitable for now.

[JauStudioFR]

I heard there are energy issues in Linux with recent AMD hardware. Valve is working with AMD to fix them.

[davideori]

It seems that you cover a lot of Linux-focused brands, which is obviously understandable. But I always wonder what companies like Tuxedo or Slimbook give as a bonus to justify their price overhead with respect to others like XMG/Schenker and pcspecialist who sell laptops with identical (or very similar) configurations at a lower price. As an example, the Stellaris 15 basic configuration I can match with the XMG CORE 15, but the former is priced 1820 euro while the XMG is 1648 euro and I am pretty sure I can configure a very similar product on the pcspecialist store and get even lower prices. I would be interested to see what I am really paying for going to these Linux-focused brands

[Markste-in]

You can't really use USB-C for sustained charging with this laptop. The laptop can draw more than 200W under load. USB-C PD goes just up to 100W. You would not be able to use the laptops performance for more than an hour before it dies not matter what (even plugged in).

[shrirangkahale]

The GPU's might be running at different power limits..
In laptops some RTX 3050 can even beat 3060 because power limits...
Nvidia has ditched the "Max-Q" naming scheme

[David_Granger]

Tuxedo probably watched your reviews. They're a small company and probably want to get feedback on their products.

[ignisflamme]

Nick, the reason that it doesn't use USB C to charge is because USB C only supports up to 50W charging which is nowhere near enough to keep the laptop topped up when under a heavy load