Lisa Gade benchmarks and tests Intel’s new 11th gen Tiger Lake H45 8-core CPU. This is Intel’s first 10mn processor in their nominally 45 watt H series of CPUs for gaming laptops and mobile workstations. We look at an Intel-branded custom system based on a pre-release MSI Creator Z16 with the unusual pairing of an Intel Core i9-11980HK overclockable 8-core CPU and NVIDIA RTX 3060 65 watt (seriously Max-Q low power) dedicated graphics. Since this is a creator focused laptop in a 16.5mm chassis, our benchmarks, comparisons and thermal tests focus on CPU performance rather than gaming (the GPU is too weak for competitive analysis in games vs it’s peers). We compare the CPU to the last gen Core i9-10980HK, the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX and the Alienware Area 51m R2 laptop with a desktop Core i7-10700K. Pre-orders for 11th gen laptops start this week, and Intel says they have 1 million CPUs ready to go for the launch.
