The MSI Stealth 15M is proof that gaming laptops with 15 W to 28 W Tiger Lake Core U CPUs can work ^↺

The vast majority of gaming laptops in the market at the moment come with 35 W to 45 W Core H series CPUs and GeForce GTX or RTX graphics options. Aside from a small handful of exceptions, most manufacturers do not offer Core U options on any of their gaming laptops as the slower CPU performance may bottleneck the high-performance graphics. However, the recent MSI Stealth 15M is the best example we've seen thus far of a Core U CPU working extremely well with a GeForce RTX GPU.

As detailed in our review, the MSI system comes with an ULV Intel 11th gen Core i7-1185G7 CPU which is one of the fastest processors available in the Tiger Lake-U family. Raw multi-thread performance is about 3 to 15 percent slower than the Core i7-9750H while single-thread performance can be up to 20 to 30 percent faster. The Core i7-9750H powered most gaming laptops of 2019 and the Core i7-1185G7 is already neck-to-neck in raw performance while consuming about half the power.

When running actual games, the Stealth 15M and its GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q GPU perform only a few percentage points slower than the average GeForce GTX 1660 Ti laptop even though most of these competing systems come with more demanding Core H CPUs. We're not saying all gaming laptops with GeForce RTX 3070 or 3080 GPUs should come with Core U CPUs, but the performance deficit between Core H gaming laptops and potential Core U gaming laptops looks to be smaller than expected. Our experience with the latest Intel NUC equipped with the same Core i7-1185G7 CPU but an even more powerful GeForce RTX 3080 GPU is further proof than most games are much more GPU bound than CPU bound to the point where the latest Core U CPU can work almost as well in many cases. If OEMs can design thinner or quieter gaming laptops with Core U CPUs, then the relatively small performance deficit may be worth it to some gamers.