MSI Raider 16 Max HX proves Intel Arrow Lake is still a force to reckon with

w 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.

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.

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.

More performance benchmarks and comparisons can be found on our dedicated review of the MSI Raider 16 HX.