GoKawiilWhen you use a laptop, you might assume that it will always perform the same, whether you use it while plugged in or unplugged. After all, these systems are designed to be used on the go. But for a long time, that hasn't been the case.
More recently, some silicon vendors have been boasting about closer parity in plugged and unplugged performance, offering you similar power whether you're working at your desk or anywhere else. To see the current state of this, we've taken samples of the latest laptop from each major CPU manufacturer: Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple, and run a few tests to see how they compare.
For the Windows systems, we used the balanced power profile, which was already the default on the majority of these laptops, while the MacBook Pro has an "automatic" power management profile out of the box.
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Where we could, we went for top-end processors, including the Intel Core Ultra X9 388H, Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, and Apple's M5 Max. In AMD's case, we had two Gorgon Point processors, a Ryzen AI 9 465 and a Ryzen AI 7 445. To see some generational gains, we also included an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V "Lunar Lake" chip.
We tested three ways: in Cinebench 2026 single-core and multi-core workloads, as well as using Handbrake, an open source video conversion tool, to transcode a 4K video to 1080p.
Note that we're not comparing the scores of the systems to each other. We're comparing the systems to themselves, to see how performance changes on the battery.
With those tests run, we can calculate percentage differences to see percentage changes. Notably, a number of systems actually increased performance ever so slightly on battery. This occurred the most on multi-threaded Cinebench, where the Zenbook A16 with Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme increased by 13.06%, while the ThinkPad X9 bumped up by 4.98%.
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Swipe to scroll horizontally Row 0 - Cell 0 Asus Zenbook Duo (Intel Core Ultra X9 388H) Asus Zenbook A16 (Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme) Apple MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max) Acer Swift Go 16 AI (AMD Ryzen AI 7 445) Average +0.01% -0.41% +0.08% -50.06% Cinebench 2026 (Single-threaded) 0%
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