Core Ultra X9 388H runs slower than Core Ultra X7 386H in first benchmarks

The Panther Lake-X series currently comes in two flavors: the Core Ultra X7 386H and Core Ultra X9 388H. The two CPUs differ only in target clock rates as they otherwise share the exact same core count and features. In practice, this means that laptops sporting the Core Ultra X9 may sometimes run slower than laptops with the Core Ultra X7 depending on how effective their overlying cooling solutions are.

The first two models sporting the Core Ultra X9 in our tests include the Asus Zenbook Duo and the HP OmniBook Ultra 14. Unfortunately for HP, the OmniBook is roughly 11 percent and 7 percent slower than the Asus in multi-threaded workloads and graphics performance, respectively. The delta is wide enough that the HP is slower than many laptops sporting the Core Ultra X7 including the Dell XPS 14 or Asus ExpertBook Ultra. The difference may be just a few percentage points, but they are nonetheless consistent enough in benchmarks to be notable.

The narrow and sometimes unreliable performance gap between the Core Ultra X7 and Core Ultra X9 means that we recommend considering the Core Ultra X7 over the X9 whenever possible to save a few hundred dollars. Buyers will be unlikely to notice any minor performance advantages with the X9 and the money saved can instead be invested in other aspects like additional RAM or storage.

At the moment, some laptops ship with the Core Ultra X9 but without any X7 options including the OmniBook Ultra 14. Buyers may then want to be careful as this essentially forces them to pay a premium for the X9 even when it undoubtedly offers little to no benefits over the X7. More benchmarks and comparisons with the Panther Lake-X9 can be found on our review of the aforementioned HP model.