- So it's that time of year again.
Intel has released its new mobile processors.
It's 12th Gen line code named Alder Lake.
The desktop version of these chips
have been out for awhile and they're quite powerful,
but we've been waiting for months to try out
the laptop versions and see how they compare
to the best chips on the market,
including of course, Apple's M1 Max.
And we've finally got a system in our hands.
We've run some tests, we've exported some videos,
we've played some games, and we finally got answers
to the questions we've been asking for months.
Well, we kind of do.
There are some caveats, so let's get into it.
(exciting music)
Alder Lake is an entirely new architecture for Intel
and it represents a major strategic shift for the company.
Intel processors have showed off
some serious single core power in recent years,
but where they've really fallen behind Apple and AMD
is in power efficiency,
that is battery life.
So this year, Intel is going hybrid.
Like Apple's M1, these new chips have a combination
of performance cores and efficiency cores.
The chip we had today is the Core i9-12900HK,
which is the flagship of this year's Alder Lake mobile one.
Intel says it's the most powerful mobile chip
that it's ever made.
So it has 14 cores, including six performance cores
and eight efficiency cores.
If any Intel chip is going to beat Apple's powerhouses,
it's probably this one.
The system we have here is the MSI GE76 Raider
and this gaming laptop is the mother of all gaming laptops.
It's 17 inches, it's covered in RGB,
it's six and a half pounds,
and it's got NVIDIA's brand new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti,
mobile GPU, and some heavy duty cooling inside.
Before we go any further,
the thing to note about this device
is that it's not cheap.
The 12th Gen GE76 Raider models will start as low as $1,599,
but if you want the powerful specs we have here,
you'll need to fork over $3,999.
You can probably see why Intel chose this device
as the first Alder Lake laptop to show the public.
It's about as close to a desktop as a laptop can get.
So if you are the most powerful chip on the market
trying to show off your full potential,
the GE76 Raider is where you want to live.
Now, there are a lot of things to like
about the GE76 Raider.
The keyboard and the light strip are both
full of pretty colors, and while the keys aren't the fastest
or the sturdiest one I've ever used,
they have a quite a satisfying click.
(typing keys clicking)
The speakers are fantastic with some serious bass,
which I rarely ever get to say about laptop audio,
and the port selection is huge.
So you get three USB-A, two USB-C,
a full-size SD slot, a headphone jack,
a display port, and HDMI and an ethernet jack,
and everything is pretty spread out.
I really had all the ports I needed.
But there are also some things that are a bit odd
to see at this price point.
In particular, if you're paying $4,000 for a laptop,
you would probably expect that laptop to have a QHD,
if not a 4K screen, but nope.
Our test model is a good 1920 x 1080
with a 360 Hertz refresh rate.
That's a lot of frames, but on a 17-inch display
it still means you're talking about some substantial pixels.
And while my games didn't look terrible,
they did look a bit grainy.
MSI is also selling a 240 Hertz QHD model
for the same $4,000 price, and to be honest,
I don't see a reason not to just buy that one,
unless you're an E-sports person
who really needs those extra frames.
For everyone else, the primary benefit
of having a 360 Hz 1080p screen is that
it allows Intel's processor to show off
some absolutely absurd frame rates.
So let's talk about those frame rates.
This is hands down, the most powerful gaming laptop
I have ever tested.
On famously demanding games, like Red Dead Redemption 2,
Cyberpunk 2077, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider,
this GE76 put up the best frame rates we've ever seen.
I ran CS:GO, which is a super CPU heavy game,
mostly for fun and average 415 frames per second,
which I think is the highest frame rate
I've ever seen a laptop generate on any game ever.
Our favorite gaming laptop of 2021,
the Zephyrus G 15 got less than half that.
So this is mostly just to get those numbers out of the way.
If you're paying $4,000 for a gaming laptop,
you should be getting better frame rates
than every other gamer you know.
But what's even more impressive
is how dominant this chip is in productivity workloads.
(soft upbeat music)
We ran our real world 4K video export
and the GE76 Raider just wrecked it.
It finished in just a 1:56.
That's the fastest time I've ever seen a laptop
complete this test, except for, can you guess?
The M1 MacBook Pro with M1 Max.
Now because different versions of Premiere Pro
can impact the export time,
this real world test doesn't always make
for the best apples to apples comparison,
but the GE76 was even more dominant
on the synthetic Puget Systems benchmark for Premiere Pro,
which tests live playback and export performance.
So this device got the highest score
I have ever seen a laptop get on that test.
Not only is it beating Intel's 11th Gen chips,
but it's beating every score I've ever seen
an M1 machine get as well.
You're getting desktop level performance here
when it comes to content creation.
(light music)
But there are some big, big asterisks here.
So first, this is a huge laptop.
For some context, the 60-inch MacBook Pro
that achieved these results is 4.8 pounds
and 0.66 inches thick.
That's not a tiny machine,
but the GE76 Raider is six and a half pounds
and over an inch thick.
That extra size and weight is a significant compromise.
Now, before you get mad at me in the comments,
I know the GE76 and the MacBook
are targeting different audiences,
and these comparisons between the Core i9 and the M1 Max
probably don't matter to too many gamers.
But they matter in general because they help us see
where Intel is in the context of the broader market.
And they help illustrate how much extra power
and cooling the Core i9 needs to achieve this performance.
And then there's battery life.
The battery life, it wasn't great.
I got just over four and a half hours
when I was multitasking in Chrome,
and that's not a terrible result
among today's 17-inch gaming laptops,
but that was sort of Intel's whole goal
in moving to a hybrid architecture.
It was supposed to deliver exceptional battery life.
And this battery life is just average
and it's nowhere near the 10-hour lifespan we got
out of our 16-inch M1 Max system.
While gaming on battery, the GE76 could go
for an hour and 15 minutes before dying.
That's actually an okay score,
but it's somewhat misleading because the game
was only really playable until about 45 to 50 minutes in.
For the last half hour or so,
it was stuttering all over the place
and just not really fun.
That makes me nervous for what we might see
coming out of ultra portable laptops,
where battery life is way more important
than it is for gaming devices.
This was a test of Alder Lake's E-Cores
and in my opinion, they didn't passed.
(soft upbeat music)
All in all from the battery life to the weight,
to the port selection,
it's increasingly clear why Intel chose the GE76
to show off Alder Lake mobile for the first time.
It's a laptop that's meant to spend
most of its time plugged in,
so battery life isn't super important.
And it's a laptop that puts basically no constraints
on the Core i9 inside.
MSI was able to pair the chip
with NVIDIA's top of the line mobile GPU
and provide the heavy duty cooling necessary
to make that pair work,
and it's charging a very, very high price
for all that engineering.
But the GE76 Raider is still a pretty specific use case.
And if the rest of the market is any indication,
shoppers, myself included, really want
thin and portable laptops right now.
Many of the biggest manufacturers
are making their laptops thinner and lighter
at the expense of other features.
To really judge whether Intel's venture
into hybrid architecture has been successful,
we need to know whether these mobile chips will deliver
in a thin, light, and most importantly,
affordable chassis in the future.
We've seen Alder Lake perform very well
in multiple power user desktop scenarios at this point,
but on-the-go use, for me, it still a question mark.
So yes, Intel has made an astonishingly powerful chip.
Good job, Intel. Good job.
But when it comes to performance
and battery life in a machine,
I might actually wanna buy.
I'm still waiting.
Thanks for watching.
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