Searching for a new powerful gaming laptop or workstation-level notebook for serious content work? New Intel CPUs launched Tuesday could give you plenty of reasons to celebrate.
The chip giant’s new Core i9, Core i7, Core i5, and Xeon processors are members of the 11th Generation “Tiger Lake-H” series of laptop CPUs. They’re destined to show up in more than 80 new and refreshed laptops from the likes of Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and other manufacturers before the end of the year, Intel announced.
The cream of the new crop is the Core i9-11980HK, an eight-core, 16-thread behemoth that has a 5GHz maximum boost clock speed and unlocked multipliers. It’ll likely show up in what Intel calls “halo enthusiast” laptops—ones designed to let you play graphics-intensive games at 1080p on a screen with a 240Hz refresh rate, or at 4K up to 120Hz.
These are some impressive claims, although performance will of course depend on the individual laptop and the game you’re playing. Intel says that across a broad collection of games such as Far Cry: New Dawn, Hitman 3, and War Thunder, the Core i9-11980HK should offer anywhere from a 5% to a 21% boost over its 10th Generation Core i9-10980HK predecessor, depending on the title. That’s assuming the laptop is equipped with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics processor.
Such powerful specs typically show up only in monstrous gaming laptops that weigh more than 5 pounds and have 15-inch or 17-inch screens. And most people who bought a laptop last year with those specs aren’t looking to upgrade any time soon. If you bought a top-of-the-line gaming rig a few years ago, however, you’re a more likely candidate for a new laptop with a Core i9-11980HK.
To illustrate what you can look forward to if you’re in this situation and ready for an upgrade, Intel showed off a sneak peek of the new chip in action during a media briefing ahead of Tuesday’s launch. The demonstration pitted a laptop with an 8th Generation Core i9 and a GeForce GTX 1080 mobile GPU against the brand-new Core i9-11980HK and GeForce RTX 3080.
The older laptop is a massive, thick black slab that requires not one but two separate power bricks. Connected to an external 4K monitor, it managed to run Halo at an average of just 30 frames per second (fps). With the same setup, the 11th Generation Core i9 system achieved about 60fps.
What Gamers Want: Thin, Light, and Powerful Laptops
That’s an impressive doubling of performance, although it took place in Intel’s labs, so it’s not an independently run performance test. And many gamers don’t care about the demands of a 4K screen and are more interested in thinner, lighter laptops that can offer a silky-smooth 1080p gaming experience.
That’s where the new Core i9-11900H and Core i7-11800H come in. These new CPUs are destined for the heart of the gaming-laptop market—devices that stand less than 0.79 inch thick and are capable of powering 4K screens at up to 60Hz and 60fps when the graphical detail setting of the game in question is Medium or High. They’ve got the same core and thread count as the Core i9-11980HK, but their maximum boost clock speeds are slightly lower.
Finally, Intel is announcing two new Core i5 chips for budget gaming laptops. Each of them has six cores and 12 threads. The Core i5-11400H has a maximum boost frequency of 4.5GHz, while the Core i5-11260H goes up to 4.4GHz. As with all of the CPUs launched today, the maximum clock speed is available only on the single best-performing core; the all-cores boost speed is lower.
Intel is counting on these two Core i5 CPUs to help win over customers who may be considering a laptop powered by a Ryzen processor from AMD instead. In fact, Intel claims that a new laptop with a Core i5-11400H and a GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card rivals the performance of one equipped with the higher-end Ryzen 9 5900HS and the same GPU.
Based on Intel’s internal tests, the performance differences are within 10% on many titles, including Far Cry: New Dawn and Hitman 3. On the game A Total War Saga: Troy, the Core i5 outperforms the Ryzen 9 laptop by 12%. Again, these claims are Intel’s own, and we’re expecting to test many of these systems ourselves in the coming weeks, so we’ll be able to better validate Intel’s claims.
Pro Laptops Get Tiger Lake-H, Too
The 11th Generation H-series CPU family made its debut in January in three initial SKUs, and Intel detailed many of the platform’s advantages at CES 2021. In addition to using the company’s new 10-nanometer “Willow Cove” processor architecture, the new chip family comes with 20 PCI Express 4.0 lanes connected directly to the CPU, as well as support for Thunderbolt 4, and an improvement to the storage controller that lets laptops boot with two SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration.
Some of these enhancements will benefit future mobile workstations and other specialized laptops aimed not at gamers but at professionals with demanding mobile-computing needs. For these purposes, Intel also launched an additional five Tiger Lake-H SKUs on Tuesday. They are the Xeon W-11955M, the Core i9-11950H, Xeon W-11855M, the Core i7-11850H, and the Core i5-11500H.
Like the chips destined for gaming laptops, the Core i9-11950H and Xeon W-11955M also feature single-core boost speeds as high as 5GHz, but they add support for Intel vPro and error-correcting code (ECC) memory that the consumer versions lack. Many IT departments and academic disciplines require these features for scientific and financial modeling, as well as increased security for laptop users handling sensitive data.
In total, that’s 10 new Tiger Lake H SKUs announced Tuesday. They join the three SKUs unveiled at the CES launch, which include the Core i7-11375H Special Edition chip. Many laptops that will use the new processors will hit the market over the next few months. We’ll test them out and add the best ones to our roundup of the top gaming laptops.
