As Intel’s Meteor Lake architecture is set to make its way into the hands of consumers this year, the jury’s still out over the performance of their chipsets as a whole. In an effort to at least give us a taste of the power that we can expect from its product lineup, the chipmaker was kind enough to let me, among others, play around with a system powered by the Core Ultra 7 165H.
Specifically, the laptop rocking the 165H was the MSI Prestige. Going off on a bit of a tangent, the new laptop from the brand certainly looks and feels light and productivity-ready but in all fairness, that has always been the theme of the lineup.
Getting back to the prowess of the 165H, I should point out that I wasn’t able to do much with the laptop and CPU, primarily because of the limited time that I and the other attending members of the media had with it. Not only that, but Intel also didn’t actually have many benchmarks readily available at the time, save for one or two programs that effectively allowed us to benchmark the onboard NPU. Specifically, a program using OpenVINO to run Stable Diffusion. Having said that, I was able to download some of the usual benchmarks programs to run with the CPU and that actually helps.
Again, the results aren’t conclusive and the laptops provided were still just engineering samples and until I actually get a laptop fitted with a Core Ultra 7 165H in my lab, the results here should be taken with a pinch of salt. Synthetically, the processor is definitely a powerhouse in its own right.
Even with tests that focus on ray-tracing, the 165H and its ARC integrated GPU did not crash and was able to complete the run, a feat that very few integrated GPU or standalone entry-level GPUs can brag about.,
Once again, this is nothing more than a sneak peek at what Intel’s Meteor Lake architecture has to offer to the mobile space and the Core Ultra 7 165H is just one of processor that the chipmaker was able to provide me a glimpse of. On a somewhat related note, I’ll be putting up my in-depth review of the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED with the Core Ultra 7 155H soon, so be sure to keep an eye out for it. That being said, I was able to get a small glimpse of the 155H’s performance via the MSI CLAW that was on display at the brand’s booth here in Las Vegas and suffice to say, those ARC GPU cores aren’t just for show.
