Consider buying a 13th-gen Core HX gaming laptop on discount.
On paper, Intel’s latest 14th-gen mobile Core HX processors don’t offer laptop buyers much in the way of an upgrade over the previous generation. In the real world, that holds true as well. And, weirdly, that’s some of the best news you’ll hear all year if you’re looking to pick up a gaming laptop without breaking the bank, because you should be able to pick up older 13th-gen laptops at a discount and barely notice a performance difference between those and Intel’s latest, greatest CPUs.
And yes, I said greatest. Intel’s 14th-gen Core i9-14900HX is the fastest mobile PC CPU we’ve ever tested, though AMD’s AMD’s Ryzen 8000 Mobile family of processors are waiting in the wings. Intel’s latest 14th-gen Core HX processors sit alongside its Core Ultra laptop chips, although the two aren’t necessarily designed to compete. The Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) chips tend to emphasize long battery life, while the Core HX chips focus on performance first.
And it’s a beast: the new Core i9-14900HX delivers 24 cores and 32 threads, combining 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores. But it’s also largely the same beast as the 13th-gen Core i9-13980HX that we tested a year ago. The number of performance (P-cores) cores remains the same, as does the number of efficiency cores (E-cores), plus the total number of threads. Even the process technology remains the same, at the Intel 7 node.
