Overview
- The Verge’s hands-on with an Asus Zenbook Duo running Intel’s Core Ultra X9 388H found it fast for intensive work and capable of 1080p high‑settings gaming, hitting roughly 60 fps with XeSS Balanced and about 40 fps on Ultra without upscaling.
- In battery testing, the Zenbook Duo lasted over 14 hours in a rundown and sustained a full workday on battery; PC Gamer reported roughly 11 hours of travel, work, and play with 18% charge remaining, including time spent gaming.
- Intel’s CES demo and reviewer testing point to NPU‑assisted XeSS 3 upscaling and multi‑frame generation as key enablers, with options up to 4x frame generation to boost perceived smoothness in single‑player titles.
- Benchmarks place Panther Lake ahead of Intel’s recent Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake mobile chips but still behind Apple M5 and AMD’s Strix Halo in many categories, underscoring strong gains without taking the overall performance crown.
- Tom’s Guide highlights AMD Strix Halo’s 256‑bit shared memory bus and reports early results that match or beat mobile RTX 4050/4060 GPUs, while noting broader independent validation, pricing, and wider device availability are still to come in 2026.