– Arrow Lake Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus outperforms Ryzen 9 9955HX3D and previous Intel CPUs by a few percentage points.
– Power consumption is significantly higher, reaching up to 276W under load vs. 93W for a comparable Panther Lake system.
– Performance-per-watt is poor, with 2x to 3x higher power draw for roughly 2x the performance.
– The Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus is essentially an overclocked Core Ultra 9 285HX with identical cores and cache.
A New Champion in Raw Performance
Panther Lake may be Intel’s newest lineup of CPUs, but there’s still a lot of life left for the last generation Arrow Lake platform. The MSI Raider 16 Max HX is now shipping complete with the Arrow Lake Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus CPU instead of Panther Lake or AMD Zen 5 and the performance results are quite impressive. This chip realy packs a punch for those who need maximum compute grunt, even if it uses a older architecture.
Benchmark Results and Comparisons
As shown by the comparison graphs below, the Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus edges out the competing Ryzen 9 9955HX3D by just a few percentage points to be the new top dog in our raw performance charts. It ever-so-slightly outperforms both the Core Ultra 9 285HX in the much more expensive Titan 18 HX AI as well and the Dell Alienware 16X Aurora which ships with similar Arrow Lake processor options. This is a impressive showing for a chip that is not even the newest generation from Intel.
Power Draw: The Main Trade-Off
The main drawback as one might expect is the higher power requirement. Running Prime95 on the Raider 16 HX would consume as much as 276 W compared to only 93 W on the Razer Blade 16 with the slower but more efficient Panther Lake Core Ultra 9 386H. Thus, while the CPU may be 2x faster, expect consumption to be 2x to 3x greater as well for generally poorer performance-per-watt. After all, the Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus is arguably just an overclocked Core Ultra 9 285HX with an identical number of cores and cache sizes between them. You get the speed, but you pay for it in battery life and heat.