To give you a point of comparison, we’ve included two additional laptops: You must evaluate performance based on the total platform, not just the CPU or GPU inside of it. Basically, there is no such thing as completely isolating the CPU in a laptop. The magic each PC maker brings to it in cooling, tuning, and chosen parts can have very large impacts on performance. You should know, however, that a CPU and GPU’s performance isn’t static. But no two laptops are the exact same-even among the same make and model-so you should expect a little variance in high-end Alder Lake gaming laptops, but hopefully not huge swings.

We do believe the CPU performance you see here is likely be fairly representative of performance the production laptop reaches. We picked the tests we wanted to run, and ran them ourselves live on The Full Nerd (subscribe to PCWorld’s YouTube channel if you aren’t already), but make no mistake-these are laptops from Intel’s own testing labs so you should always read the results with some modicum of salt until independent reviews are performed. Normally we’d opt for the higher performance profile to get the best possible performance, but we left them as set and just wanted to point it out to shoot down assumptions that Intel might have “rigged” this performance preview by opting for the maximum cooling settings. That’s actually how Intel set the laptops up in its lab, which we left intact. We ran all but the gaming benchmarks on laptops set to MSI’s balanced profile, rather than its extreme performance profile, and also set to hybrid GPU mode rather than discrete mode. MSI has also tweaked the 12th-gen laptop’s GPU to 175 watts, versus the 11th-gen version’s 165 watt TGP GPU. The updated GE76 remains the same externally as the previous-gen model, but there have been some upgrades to it, including a new MSI “phase-change liquid metal” thermal pad that boosts the CPU’s performance. The laptops were outfitted with the 14-core Core i9-12900HK CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU, 32GB of DDR5/4800 RAM, and Windows 11. While the four preproduction laptops aren’t quite final units, they’re based on MSI’s GE76 Raider with final drivers, firmware and tuning still to come.

Intel mobile 4 series benchmark