11th-gen ‘Tiger Lake H’ performance deep-dive: Intel gets back in the game
Whoa, folks—don’t head for the parking lot because this ball game ain’t over yet. Sure, you’ve been watching Intel’s older 10th-gen H-class CPUs get blasted off the mound all afternoon by Team Ryzen, but the coach just gave the signal and Intel’s new rookie star is warming up in the bullpen: the 11th-gen “Tiger Lake H” processors for gaming and creative laptops.
Unlike the once great but should-have-retired-two-seasons-ago 10th-gen Comet Lake chips, Tiger Lake H features truly new cores and is built on Intel’s most advanced 10nm “Super Fin” technology.
You can read more about Tiger Lake H’s processor lineup here, and dig into all the new 11th-gen laptops announced so far, but rather than yakety yak, let’s find out just how fast the new 11th-gen chip is.
HOW (AND WHAT) WE TESTED
To do that we got our hands on Gigabyte’s new Aorus 17G laptop. On the outside, it’s mostly the same as the previous 10th-gen–based model, but the Aorus 17G we’re testing today features the 8-core, 11th-gen Core i7-11800H CPU inside. It packs the same GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU with a TGP of 105 watts as the previous version, but it’s hooked up to the 11th-gen Tiger Lake via PCIe Gen 4, rather than the slower Gen 3 connection used by Intel’s older CPU. The 11th-gen chip has enough spare PCIe lanes that Gigabyte pairs that GPU with a speedy 1TB Samsung PM9A1 on the Gen 4 bus too. Finally, unlike with the previous Core i7 model, Gigabyte uses 32GB of DDR4/3200 memory instead of DDR4/2933—an odd limitation of the last processor. You can see the plentiful PCIe lanes Intel has put into the Tiger Lake H (page opposite).
For comparison laptops, we sought only 8-core CPUs configurations—no 6-core or 4-core laptops allowed.
• Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 with Ryzen 9 4800HS, GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q and 16GB of DDR4/3200. It has a 14-inch screen and weight of 3.6 pounds.
