Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus revealed in latest benchmark leak and is expected to deliver even more performance on flagship laptops

While Intel Panther Lake promises strong performance for thin and light gaming laptops, Intel still offers Arrow Lake-HX for the highest possible CPU performance in flagship laptops such as the MSI Titan 18 HX. Until now, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX was the fastest chip in the series, but according to the latest information from leaker Golden Pig Upgrade, the Arrow Lake-HX series will be relaunched in March or April.

Geekbench has just provided a taste of this refresh, completing a benchmark run on an Acer Predator PHN18-I71 with an Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus. According to the results, the chip has eight performance cores and 16 efficiency cores, just like the Core Ultra 9 285HX, but the processor is expected to reach slightly higher clock speeds. Geekbench reveals boost clock speeds of just under 5.4 GHz, which would be 100 MHz lower than the older flagship chip, but in practice, the clock speeds are likely to depend heavily on how much power the respective laptop can provide to the processor.

With a Geekbench 6 single-threaded score of 3,198 points and a multi-core score of 21,581 points, the Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus is already 5.6% and 4.6% faster, respectively, than the Core Ultra 9 285HX in this benchmark run. So, a huge performance leap is not to be expected, which is not surprising since the new processors are based on the same architecture as the older Arrow Lake chips.