Much-anticipated Intel Panther Lake Hands-on testing is finally available, and it certainly didn’t disappoint—the performance of its latest iGPU is truly impressive when playing AAA GamesIt runs smoothly, and more importantly, its energy efficiency is impressive—not only does it offer an extremely long battery life, but it can also run demanding games while consuming less than 60W of power. For anyone planning to buy a new laptop, Intel’s Panther Lake is definitely worth considering.
Ultra X9 388H Hands-On Review: Not Only Does It Deliver Impressive CPU and GPU Performance, but Its Power Efficiency Is Also Quite Good
Earlier, the ETA PRIME channel—which has over a million subscribers—uploaded a hands-on review of an Intel Panther Lake laptop equipped with the Ultra X9 388H processor, which features 16 cores and 16 threads, with a maximum clock speed of 5.1GHz, and supports high-speed memory of up to 96GB at 9600MT/s.
The Arc B390 integrated iGPU features 12 Xe cores, 12 ray-tracing units, and 96 XMX AI engines, and can dynamically allocate a large amount of system memory as VRAM, which is highly beneficial for AI workloads.
The laptop comes with Intel’s own AI PLAYGROUND AI tool preinstalled. Here, you can generate videos and images offline, as well as chat with large language models (LLMs). In ETA PRIME’s hands-on testing of image generation and large language model inference, GPU utilization was nearly at full capacity, and the generation speed was extremely fast:
For performance testing, he ran benchmarks such as Geekbench, Cinebench, 7-Zip, and 3DMark Time Spy.
The Geekbench CPU performance test yielded quite good scores: 3,018 points for single-core and 17,796 points for multi-core:
The same goes for CINEBENCH: it took first place in the single-threaded test with a score of 130, and while its multi-threaded score of 1,345 fell short of the Intel Xeon W3265M and Apple M1 Ultra, it’s important to note that the Ultra X9 388H has only 16 threads, whereas the other two have at least 20 threads each:
7-Zip also performed impressively, outperforming both the previous generation and its competitor, the AMD Ryzen 9 365, in both single-threaded and multi-threaded tests:
In the Geekbench AI tests, the Ultra X9 388H posted scores that were far ahead of the competition in FP32, FP16, and INT8:
Next up is GPU performance, which has drawn a lot of attention. The Arc B390 scored nearly 8,000 points in Time Spy, setting a new all-time high for Intel integrated graphics:
When running *Forza Horizon 5* at its native 1440p resolution, the frame rate remains stable at over 100 FPS. Power consumption occasionally spikes to around 55W, but there is no thermal throttling:
“Red Dead Redemption 2” averages 78 FPS at 1080p on High/Ultra settings, while consuming less than 60W:
“Spider-Man 2” also averaged 74 FPS:
“Cyberpunk 2077” runs smoothly at 1080p with high graphics settings, and with XeSS frame generation enabled, it can even average over 120 FPS at 1600p resolution—prompting ETA PRIME to exclaim that this performance “quite astonishing for an iGPU”:
Finally, we conducted a battery life test under the following conditions:
- Screen brightness: 50%
- 60Hz
- 99 Wh battery
- Quiet / Balanced / Performance Mode
ETA PRIME also offered a very positive initial assessment. He believes that Panther Lake strikes an excellent balance between performance and power consumption—not only unleashing graphics performance in high-power mode but also delivering over 18 hours of battery life for office tasks in quiet mode; even when running continuously in performance mode at approximately 55W, it can still maintain about 8 hours of usage time:
As can be seen, with the launch of Panther Lake, this generation is likely to mark a major turning point for Intel’s mobile platform—not only bringing integrated graphics into the high-end gaming arena, but also opening up new possibilities for ultrathin laptops, mini PCs, and handheld gaming consoles.
Full video:
Source: KOCPC Chinese