Odds are you're watching this video

on a laptop very similar to this,

a nearly five-year old HP Pavilion.

So for this one, I've teamed up with Intel,

who are not only sponsoring this video,

but an entire series on the channel taking a look

at how technology is changing over the next couple of years.

So one of the first thing I'm really

curious about is where we are today.

And, of course, what better way of doing that

than to compare two very similar laptops

spread out over nearly five years.

This is the HP Pavilion x360 two-in-one.

As it's powered by an eight-gen Core i7 processor,

it's going to be powerful, although

by no means some giant workstation.

But importantly it is going to be good

for the price, and even more importantly

than that, it is going to be a very close match

to our older HP Pavilion setup.

Put these two side-by-side and

the family resemblance is clear.

So the Pavilion Touchsmart was one of the very first

Windows 8 laptops that did come standard with a touchscreen.

And it actually does a lot of things right,

although if you take a look at the brand new

Pavilion x360, there have been a lot

of upgrades and changes over the last few years.

The real question is whether you actually need to upgrade.

So if you take a look at this older system,

it doesn't seem that old, and to be fair,

it still can do some basic stuff like web browsing.

It's not like it's going to be completely unusable,

but when you step over to a newer system

with the Core i7, with the Optane memory,

you're going to be getting a much, much better experience.

You're getting pretty much everything

you would expect on a modern laptop.

So stuff like USB 3.0 is here,

you're going to be getting a fourth-gen Core i5,

which is going to give you decent battery life

and okay performance, and you're even going

to be getting some extras like a DVD drive

if you're still living in 1999.

Actually, nah, that's not fair, right?

2005 was really the peak of DVD.

This guy is rocking a 15.6 inch, 1366 by 768 panel.

Now, it wasn't a terrible screen when it first came out,

but put it side-by-side with a 2018 Pavilion

and there is a huge difference.

Not only is the screen quality itself

going to be much nicer on this guy,

but having a full 1080p resolution makes a big difference.

With this guy being limited to stuff

like 720p video and sort of very little screen real estate,

it feels kind of claustrophobic in 2018.

Realistically, the screen is actually one

of the most noticeable differences.

Having a nice quality 1080p panel

does make a big difference.

And while the other one is going to be a touchscreen,

this is going to be a much more accurate touchscreen.

You also have the HP pen if you wanna use stylus input.

And one of my favorite party tricks is

that you can actually can flip the entire thing around

and treat it like a giant tablet.

Now, of course, this is going to be a 15.6 inch tablet,

so you should temper your expectations

for how portable it's going to be,

but this, especially when you pair it with the stylus,

does make a nice difference when you can, you know,

actually use it with one hand as opposed

to something like that, which doesn't, well.

Think it's kinda self-explanatory how

close that comes to being a tablet.

Now, of course, your mileage is going to vary

on something like this, but I actually do find

that the pen can be useful in some situations.

For example, if you wanna work on some graphics stuff,

if you wanna make some notes, or especially

for people who wanna have something that's going

to be a little more ergonomic.

The touch screen paired with a pen can feel

a lot better than sitting with a mouse and keyboard all day.

When it comes time to upgrade your computer,

one of the biggest questions is always

going to be to do with performance.

So when you're looking at such a wide range

of years between these two laptops,

obviously there are going to be some major differences,

but some things are also going to be very similar.

Both are currently rocking 12 gigabytes of RAM,

as well as a one terabyte hard drive,

but look a little bit closer and there

are going to be some major, major changes.

In the last few years, Intel Core processors

have seen some major leaps in performance.

Consider that we're going from a

dual-core 2.7 gigahertz boost clock all the way up

to a quad-core chip that can go

all the way up to 4 gigahertz on boost.

Now, that is really impressive,

especially when you consider that

that's all going to be in the same 15-watt TDP.

Essentially, for the same amount of power,

we're going to be doing a lot more work much, much faster.

You're also getting a smaller, thinner and lighter PC

in pretty much every aspect that not only does have

that more powerful processor, but you're also going

to be getting dedicated graphics as an option.

When you put it together, what essentially

you're getting here is something that's going

to be smaller, thinner, lighter, and more powerful

on pretty much any way that you measure it.

A lot of it has to do with the processor.

Now, don't get me wrong, it's not like a fourth-gen Core

is suddenly some archaic piece of old technology,

but things have advanced a lot and it is very noticeable

when you put them side by side.

Now, yes, it is very, very noticeable when it comes

to stuff like gaming and video editing, as you would expect,

but even for normal tasks, there's a big difference.

I mean, something as simple as opening up a webpage

can take a lot longer on the older system.

And that's something that stuff like benchmarks

don't really quite get across always.

When it comes to stuff like editing 4K video,

more performance is always going to be helpful.

Now, no, this is not going to be some giant, thick

workstation-class massive editing laptop,

but what you are getting here is a solid amount

of power, especially when you compare

it to the five-year old system.

That eighth-gen Core processor is also going to be,

of course, capable of playing back 4K video, whether

on the internal laptop screen if you've got a 4K display,

or on an external monitor, but something else

that sort of backs up this Pavilion is going

to be the dedicated AMD Radeon 530 graphics.

Now this opens you up for some light virtual reality

and mixed reality use, but almost more importantly than

that, you could do some light gaming on this guy, as well.

Now, of course, this is not going

to be a great dedicated gaming PC.

For that, you're going to want some better graphics

than the Radeon 530 in this particular system,

but the important things is the

Core i7 can definitely handle it.

So even when you pair it with something

like an Nvidia MX150, as I've done in previous videos,

you're going to be getting some much better performance,

and something that could definitely hold up.

And with the idea that you can go

with stuff like Thunderbolt solutions

to get you even better external graphics options,

having a powerful processor is very important.

Intel Optane memory is an interesting piece

of tech that I'm actually going to go much

more in-depth on in a future video,

but the basic idea is that it functions similarly

to an SSD cache, but it allows you to get the

full responsiveness of an SSD while still not

losing the full-size capacity of a hard-drive.

So this is going to speed up things,

such as opening up Windows, some of your major programs.

And it's also going to be useful for more creative

applications, such as when you're photo and video editing,

you're going to have that super-fast SSD cache,

which is all going to be working in the background.

This is one of the clearest differences

between a newer and older system.

There are so many more possibilities with this,

whereas with the older computer you

basically get what you get.

In just a few years, we've gone from thin and light laptops

being able to do basic tasks reasonably well,

to having a lot more power to the point

where you can do gaming on these.

You can do photo editing, and you can

do proper video editing on something

that is going to be this small, this thin, and this light.

I know this video was sponsored by Intel, but these

new eighth-gen Core processors are a legit game-changer.

Having this level of performance in such a thin and light

laptop just wasn't possible all that long ago.

And it's hard for me to imagine much

of a better time to upgrade than now.