Intel's Arrow Lake H Misses the Mark: Core Ultra 9 285H Review
February 10, 2025
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Is Arrow Lake H Good Enough?
Summary
Intel didn't quite hit the bullseye with their newest Arrow Lake H release as far as efficiency goes, but they still hold their own in some key areas.
Table of contents:
Intel has just released their brand-new next generation Arrow Lake H processors. These are the processors that will be found in most mainstream performance laptops. They sit above Lunar Lake in terms of performance, but below Arrow Lake HX which will be found in very large gaming laptops.
This release promises to be a big one as Intel have updated both their CPU core architecture and their manufacturing process. They are utilizing TSMC's 3nm or "N3B" process. Now, rather than just test one of these new laptops, we were able to try 3: the Zenbook DUO, the IdeaPad Pro 5i and the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo.
Summary: Good, but Not Good Enough
Overall, Arrow Lake H is an incremental step forward for Intel. It is better than Core Ultra Meteor Lake but that processor was honestly a bit of a dud. Meteor Lake was completely beat out by AMD’s Ryzen 9 on their Zen 5 architecture. The Arrow Lake H release makes Intel very competitive with AMD, but it does not surpass them.
The biggest disappointment with Arrow Lake is raw CPU multi core performance. It just doesn’t perform any better than Meteor Lake. It does do well in single-core, but not as strong as the M series.
When it comes to power efficiency, it is only slightly improved and still behind AMD’s Ryzen 9 HX 370. In terms of comparisons to AMD, Intel did ask us to focus on comparing to AMD’s Ryzen 9 365. We feel this is misleading. You can buy laptops with AMD’s highest end 370 and 375 right now for a similar price to these new Arrow Lake H laptops.
Integrated GPU performance is improved, but keep in mind many laptops with Arrow Lake H processors are going to have powerful dedicated GPUs like the Nvidia 50 series anyway.
In our content creation tests, the story remains the same as before, buy a Mac or a laptop with a dedicated GPU. These integrated GPUs are certainly nice but don’t bring these laptops into that league.
They did surprisingly well in Photoshop, though. Laptops with dedicated GPUs sometimes do poorly in this test due to pulling power away from the CPU. The MacBooks are still leagues ahead here.
Finally, Arrow Lake H does appear to have a lot of hardware optimizations. It performs very well in tests like Geekbench, which cycle through a bunch of common performance tasks.
CPU Makeup
Today we will only be going over the highest-end Core Ultra 9 285H chip as that’s the one in all three laptops we were able to test. This CPU has the same 16 cores as meteor lake’s 185H chip that it’s replacing. 6 performance, 8 efficient, 2 low-powered efficient cores, same max operating temperature of 110 degrees Celsius, and a 24MB smart cache, but the similarities stop there. They’ve moved over from Redwood P cores and Crestmont E cores to Lion Cove P cores and Skymont E cores. Each of these cores are single-threaded. The chips are no longer produced on Intel’s 4 process i.e. their 7nm. They are now produced by TSMC on their 3nm process. A smaller manufacturing process leads to better power efficiency. One nice side effect of this is that this processor increases its max turbo frequency from 5.1GHz to 5.4. It also comes included with an upgraded GPU. Intel’s Arc 140T integrated graphics with 8 Xe cores that enable frame generation and ray tracing in a small set of games. Lastly, this processor includes an NPU just like its predecessor, but it’s slightly more capable up from 11 to 13 TOPS.
Heat & Fan Noise
In the Zenbook DUO, which is our lower wattage laptop with Arrow Lake, we’re seeing reasonable results during a 10-minute Cinebench run that maxes out the CPU. A little warm on the underside but the keyboard deck stays cool. This is probably due to its unique two-screen design and how the keyboard itself isn’t directly part of the laptop, it just sits on top of the lower screen and doesn’t get as warm. In the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo, which feeds its processor a bit more power, we’re seeing completely unacceptable levels of heat. I’m not a doctor but this looks pretty dangerous. This could be due to its thinner chassis or them feeding it too much wattage for the included cooling solution, but we would NOT advise doing high performance CPU tasks on this laptop. The IdeaPad Pro 5i, on the other hand, does really well here staying comfortably cool when the CPU is being maxed out.
The Zenbook DUO’s fan noise is near the top end of comparable laptops. Oddly enough, the Prestige has less fan noise than the DUO, even though it should clearly be ramping them up more to help with that horrible heat. The IdeaPad falls in the middle here, you can definitely hear the fans going but I’ll take the cooler, louder laptop over the furnace.
All 3 of these laptops do have Balanced modes, which they are run at by default. These pull less power than their high-performance modes and therefore generate less heat and fan noise. Since, as we showed you earlier, this processor has significant diminishing marginal returns of feeding it more power, you can save a lot of fan noise heat by running these laptops in those modes. You will also see minimal drops in performance for the MSI and IdeaPad.
Battery Life
Let's take a look at battery life. To test high performance tasks while unplugged we ran Cinebench on a loop for 30 minutes. Only one of these laptops dropped their max performance while unplugged, and it wasn’t by much. In both the DUO and the Prestige, we’re seeing around two thirds battery left over after our 30-minute run, which is very competitive for a performance oriented laptop. You can see that both these laptops have more juice remaining after this test than 2 of the AMD Zen 5 laptops the OmniBook Ultra and Yoga Pro 7. The IdeaPad, however, does not do very well here with only 41% remaining. That’s worse than our worst performing Zen 5 chips in the OmniBook and Yoga Pro.
When it comes to lighter tasks like playing a video over Wi-Fi, the improved efficiency of these chips becomes a bit clearer. We’re seeing about a 10% increase in battery remaining on the new Arrow Lake 285H chip in the DUO from its 185H predecessor with the same size battery and screen. The DUO and Prestige also do pretty well compared to the rest of the ones on the list, albeit a little worse than the MacBooks and the throttled Zenbook S 16 laptop. The IdeaPad does okay here, better than two of the better performing Zen 5 ones.
When we do our full video playback rundown, which is a highly optimized use-case of watching downloaded content, the results become muddied again. The Zenbook DUO only gets 13 hours, which is certainly nothing to sneeze at, but it’s not as strong as the Snapdragon or M4 laptops with smaller batteries. The Prestige, on the other hand, really makes use of its 98Wh battery and gets over 19 hours on this rundown test. That means it does about 50% better than the DUO with only a 20% larger battery. The IdeaPad has a larger battery than the DUO but does worse here. That means it’s the worst of the three in all of our battery tests.
One thing I want to bring up is we normally set the laptops to their best battery settings for these lighter battery tests. On the MSI Prestige and IdeaPad, though, it limited its performance significantly on Eco mode. So, to ensure the laptop is functional, we ran those ones on balanced mode.
Gaming
In real world gaming Forza was playable on medium settings when I used the IdeaPad. Not great, but playable at around 46 FPS. This number only increased to 47 with XeSS enabled, which is Intel’s resolution scaling and/or frame generation feature, so I’d say that’s not going to do much for you. These laptops are probably suitable for light games or low settings, but not much more than that.
Linux Compatibility
Unfortunately the latest version of Fedora did not work well on any of these laptops. On the IdeaPad Pro 5i the trackpad and speakers did not work, and when I tried to search for an application it would find it but not load. On the Prestige Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Trackpad, and Speakers all did not work. On the Duo Fedora wouldn’t even properly load. So, Linux users, you will probably have to wait for drivers and the like to catch up, or just code them yourself.
