Intel Core Ultra9 285H: Can Arrow Lake H deliver MacBook Pro beating battery life and fast performance?

Intel’s Core Ultra (series 2) of laptop chips have so far impressed with their ability to run and run, but performance hasn’t been as impressive as battery life. Now, with Intel’s Arrow Lake chips surfacing at CES 2025 last month, we’re promised both better performance and long battery life.

Having finally matched Apple’s MacBook Air on the stamina front, though, can Intel’s latest chip bring Windows workstations on par with Apple’s MacBook Pro machines?

I’ve spent the last week putting an MSI laptop – the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) – with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H inside through its paces.

READ NEXT: Intel’s Core Ultra 200V series has finally matched Snapdragon for battery life

Arrow Lake H: What you need to know

Arrow Lake H, or the Intel Core Ultra 200H series as it will become known henceforth, is Intel’s mid-priced workstation range of mobile chips. You’ll find it in laptops aimed at creative professionals, video editors, 3D designers, scientists and gamers – laptops for the more demanding user, in other words.

It’s a natural competitor to chips like the Apple M4 and M4 Pro found in MacBook Pro laptops but in Intel’s Core Ultra (series 2) range, it sits above the V-series chips – found in the likes of the Asus Zenbook S 14 (UX5406) – and below the HX series of chips, which are aimed at premium gaming machines for the most part.

As with the U series chips, the H series is split into Core Ultra5, Core Ultra7 and Core Ultra9, and across these three there are five specific models:

• Intel Core Ultra9 285H – 16-core, up to 5.4GHz
• Intel Core Ultra7 265H – 16-core, up to 5.3GHz
• Intel Core Ultra7 255H – 16-core, up to 5.1GHz
• Intel Core Ultra5 235H – 14-core, up to 5GHz
• Intel Core Ultra5 225H – 14-core, up to 4.9GHz

The Core Ultra9 285H chip I’m testing has 16 cores, split into three types – six performance cores, eight Efficient cores and a pair of low-power Efficient cores – and it Turbo Boosts up to a maximum of 5.4GHz. It has an integrated graphics chip – the Intel Arc 140T – which Intel says delivers a not-inconsequential improvement of 20% in performance over the integrated graphics seen in the 100H Meteor Lake series of chips.

And, as you’d expect in this day and age, there’s an NPU, although oddly, this one is a cut down version of the module in the U-series and only delivers 13TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of local AI compute power. Intel, however, is keen to point out that, in combination with the more powerful GPU, the chip provides a total of 86TOPS of local AI compute.

In this MSI laptop, it’s supported by a generous 32GB of quad-channel 7,500MHz LPDDR5 RAM and a 1TB SSD.

Intel Core Ultra9 285H review: Battery life

To get an idea of how the new chip performs, I’ve run the same tests I usually do when I get any laptop in. That is to say, I run our usual in-house 4K media benchmark, a selection of third-party benchmarks and games tests, the idea being to get an overview of how the CPU affects overall system performance, not just the CPU itself.

I also ran our usual battery test – a video playback test with the screen set to a predetermined brightness level and the laptop in flight mode – and that’s what I want to focus on first, because if Intel isn’t nailing that side of it, then what’s the point? It was already producing fast, powerful CPUs for laptops before, they just weren’t as efficient as the opposition.

The news is, tentatively, good. This MSI machine, endowed as it is with a relatively power hungry 15.6in display, lasted an impressive 16hrs 51mins in our tests, which isn’t bad at all and, notably, it’s a significant amount longer than H-series Intel-powered laptops we’ve seen from previous generations of Intel silicon. Here’s a chart comparing it against two relatively recent examples – the Asus Zenbook Duo (2024) and the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra (2024) – which both had the equivalent Core Ultra9 185H from the previous generation inside:

That’s a 55% improvement over the Duo and an 83% improvement over the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra, although it’s worth noting that the MSI has a considerably larger battery than both (99Wh vs 76Wh in the Samsung and 65Wh in the Asus) and that other factors affect battery life. Even taking that into account, however, this is more of an improvement than I’d expect from simply increasing the capacity of the battery (around 30%). The MSI laptop also outlasted the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370-powered Asus Zenbook S 16 by nearly three hours, a significant victory for the Intel powered machine.

It isn’t, of course, quite the battery beast that laptops based on the lighter weight, lower power Core Ultra 200V series chips have proved themselves to be. Both the Asus Zenbook S 14 UX5406 (built around the Core Ultra9 288V)  and the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition (Core Ultra7 258V) lasted longer than the MSI (with smaller batteries, no less) and, perhaps more significantly, the MacBook Pro M4 (2024) also proved superior.

Intel Core Ultra9 285H review: Performance

Moving onto performance and that’s a far clearer picture. In synthetic benchmarks, the Intel Core Ultra9 performed brilliantly against the competition, for both CPU and GPU tasks. In Geekbench 6, it scores higher in the multicore element than the Core Ultra9 185H in the Zenbook Duo and Galaxy Book4 Ultra, the Ryzen AI 9 365 in the MSI Prestige A16 AI+ and also, significantly, the M4 in the 2024 MacBook Pro.

For the next group of results , I’ve thrown in our results for the Mac Mini M4 Pro to provide a little context with Apple’s more powerful chips, and removed the result for the lower-power 200V series Intel chips because those are slower across the board. The numbers speak for themselves here, where the only notable change in positions is that the Ryzen AI 9 HX390 in the Zenbook S 16 edges in front.

However, it’s in the graphics tests that the Intel Core Ultra9 285H and its Arc 140T integrated graphics really flies. In the Geekbench 6 OpenCL GPU test, as you can see from the chart below, it beats the Core Ultra9 185H-based Zenbook Duo by 33%, the Ryzen AI 9-powered Asus Zenbook S 16 by 19% and the M4 Apple MacBook Pro by 10%, although the more beefy M4 Pro powered Mac mini does stretch out much more of a lead.

We don’t normally run games benchmarks on systems with integrated graphics but, just to set it in some context, I ran the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark on it and, while GPU power is improved, it clearly indicates you’re still much better off with a laptop with a discrete GPU if you want to play games on the move. In the examples provided, the Asus Vivobook 16X comes with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU while the Acer Nitro V15 has an RTX 3050. Both outperform the MSI and its Intel Core Ultra9 285H by a considerable margin, despite having much older, slower CPUs:

Intel Core Ultra9 285H review: Verdict

Clearly, you still need a discrete GPU if you want to game on your laptop. Arrow Lake H isn’t going to change that. But from a quick look at the early benchmarks, it looks like Intel’s latest series of chips is another positive step forwards. Not only does it extend overall CPU and GPU performance over the previous generation but efficiency has received a big boost, which is great news for anyone who needs lots of power but frequently travels for work.

Intel is slowly but surely eating into the advantage Apple holds over it here – certainly for mid-range, workstation type laptops and the M4-powered MacBook Pro – and that augurs well for the future of Intel-powered Windows laptops. It’s good news for Intel, too, and as long as it doesn’t drop the ball again in the near future, it looks to have finally turned the corner on efficiency.

What does that mean for this specific laptop? Well, the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo looks like a bit of a bargain to me. Although the design and build quality can’t match the best in the business, with prices likely to start at around £1,400-£1,500 (it’s currently $1,449 in the US), it should prove a great alternative as a large, lightweight alternative to a 16in MacBook Pro. If you simply can’t or won’t go down the Apple route, it’s a well priced, lightweight alternative with a massive display.