Intel Arrow Lake-H Powered MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo: Starting At $1,299.00 An MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo 16-inch laptop with Intel's Arrow Lake-H Core Ultra 9 285H platform was our test vehicle for this performance review, and we came away impressed by its strong CPU performance, excellent GPU performance and respectable battery life.
Excellent Single Threaded Responsiveness
Excellent Multi-Threaded Performance
Superb Arc 140T Graphics Performance
Excellent Ecosystem Software Support For AI, Etc.
MSI's Prestige 16 AI Evo Is A Powerful, Premium, Understated Laptop
Middling NPU Performance
Respectable Though Middling Power Efficiency
When Intel took the wraps off its next generation Arrow Lake-H mobile CPUs back at CES earlier this year, we were encouraged by the potential of the updated chip core architecture, as well as the platform's interesting integrated Arc graphics GPU updates and IO technology support for Thunderbolt 5 and PCIe Gen 5. Intel has seemingly revamped its higher performance laptop platform processor family with a bit of augmented previous generation technology, along with new core technologies, but optimized and scaled up for more performance at a higher power envelope.
The only thing left to do was explore Arrow Lake-H's performance for ourselves and prove out Intel's claims in real world testing, and that's what we're able to show you here today via the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo, a premium 16-inch thin and light laptop that strikes a minimalist pose.
How does Intel's new 28 to 45 Watt premium performance thin and light laptop platform compete versus the likes of AMD's Ryzen AI 300 series or Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite, and can Intel keep pace with rising competition from all sides? Let's answer these questions on the pages ahead...
MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo And Arrow Lake-H Specifications & Features
We've seen MSI's Prestige 16 AI Evo laptop in previous Intel Core Ultra mobile launches, specifically for the launch of Intel's previous gen Meteor Lake platform. Interestingly, the machine we've tested for this evaluation today is identical to the machine we tested a little over year ago for the Meteor Lake launch. As such, this review is not about the test vehicle laptop we received, which is an engineering sample by the way, but the Arrow Lake-H Core Ultra 9 285H processor under its hood.
The Core Ultra 9 285H is a 16 core chip comprised of 6 Performance Cores, 8 Efficiency Cores and two low power E-Cores situated on a separate low power island, specifically dedicated for specialized low lift workloads like video playback, etc. This configuration brings us to 16 CPU cores and threads total, with a beefed-up Intel Xe Alchemist GPU architecture, now with 2x the L2 cache with 8MB dedicated for the GPU, and 2 Render Slices, each with 4 Xe-cores, totaling up to 8 Xe-cores with 128 total vector engines on board.
Intel Core Ultra 200H Series Features And Performance Gains
This version of Arc 140 graphics, or what Intel call's "LPG+", incorporates twice as many Vector Engines as Lunar Lake's Battlemage infused GPU, but is similar to Meteor Lake, except for its increased L2 cache and the addition of XMX (Xe Matrix Extensions) for AI workloads and Intel's latest XeSS2 Super Resolution upscaling with Frame Generation. All in, Intel is claiming Arrow Lake-H's GPU offers a 22% geomean lift in gaming performance versus Meteor Lake without XeSS2 enabled and even higher performance with Frame Gen turned on.
And with all that setup and background covered, what do you say we look at Core Ultra 9 285H Arrow Lake-H performance with MSI's Prestige 16 AI Evo laptop, next...
