CES 2024 | Intel Core Ultra 7 165H first benchmarks analysis: Meteor Lake beats Raptor Lake under sustained load

Intel Meteor Lake, also known as Intel Core Ultra Series 1, is slowly trickling into the market. We had some opportunities to test the new platform already, but so far only in form of the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H.

At the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, Intel hosted the press for a so called Performance Workshop. Here, the media had the opportunity to benchmark a different brand new Core Ultra CPU: The Intel Core Ultra 7 165H, which has higher clock rates compared with the Ultra 7 155H. Notably, these benchmarks were not performed on a production-level device. Instead, they were done on an unnamed engineering sample made by MSI, though a similarity to the MSI Prestige 16 series was obvious. 

These tests were performed in best performance mode. In this case, this resulted in a PL2 of 65 W, with a sustained load power limit (PL1) of 55 W. For our comparison, we used the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7630 with the Intel Core i7-13700H (PL1 53 W / PL2 89 W) and the Lenovo ThinkPad P16v G1 with the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS (PL1 54 W / PL2 64 W).

Core Ultra 7 beats i7-13700H in sustained multicore performance

As always, we use Cinebench in its various versions to test CPU performance. Here, the new Core Ultra chip shows the familiar level of performance for this new generation: The single core performance lags behind the preceding CPU generation Raptor Lake. However, the Core Ultra 7 beats the Core i7 when it comes to sustained CPU performance, as Meteor Lake holds a higher performance level under load. In this regard, the Intel CPU performs similar to the Zen 4 chip.