Intel Panther Lake Gaming Handheld Spotted Boosting Past 35 Watts

If you read that headline and thought, ‘Oh yeah, so what?’ then you're probably not too familiar with gaming handhelds. These devices have cooling apparatus of impressive efficiency given the extremely limited space they have to work in, but the laws of physics have this annoying way of being extremely immutable. That is to say that very few handheld gaming systems exceed 35W for their main SoC; the Steam Deck tops out at just 15W.

Now, the result in question here is actually a Furmark benchmark that does not specifically list what device it was run on. It's our friends over at Notebookcheck who have decreed that this result came from a OneXPlayer gaming handheld; likely a new model of the OneXPlayer X1. They made that deduction based on two circumstantial factors: a number of Panther Lake benchmark leaks have come from OneXPlayer recently (including a Geekbench leak), and the fact that the benchmark was run in a 2560×1440 resolution.


Those are admittedly some pretty flimsy correlations; the OneXPlayer X1 has a screen resolution of 2560×1600, not 1440 (QHD), and there are a great many devices out there with 2560-pixel-wide displays. Still, it's completely plausible, and a company like OneXPlayer is exactly the sort of place that would run a Panther Lake processor well above what is likely its Intel-approved TDP range. The company's extant Core Ultra 200H chips mostly come with nominal 28W TDPs, and while they can pull up to 115W under turbo, if you query the machine for its power limit, it's going to report 28W, not 115W.

So saying, this Furmark result is likely OneXPlayer (or another vendor) stress testing the capability of its cooling hardware. Any chip with a potent CPU and GPU onboard—like this Core Ultra 5 338H and its accompanying Arc B370 integrated GPU—can absolutely scale performance way beyond its conservative power limits; AMD's ‘Phoenix’ (used in chips like the Ryzen 7 260 and Ryzen 9 8945HS) has a nominal power limit range of 35-54W, but we've tested it in unlocked form on desktop and found that it can continue to scale performance all the way to 150W when both CPU and GPU are heavily loaded.

In other words, whoever originated this benchmark leak is likely trying to find the absolute peak power at which they can afford to run the Core Ultra 5 388H so that their product—whether it be a gaming handheld as suspected, a laptop, or even a mini-PC—is among the fastest with a Panther Lake processor onboard. We expect we'll be benchmarking a whole bevy of Panther Lake machines in the early part of next year, so it will be fascinating to see if those hopes hold out, as well as how Intel's new cat holds up against AMD's mythic competition.