Intel’s NEW $600 "Wildcat" Laptops Make the Neo Look Expensive

[00:02] have their answer to the MacBook Neo thanks to Intel's newest CPUs. Wild laptops are being announced right now with these new processors. Dell just announced a $600 XVS13 at Computex, a premium CNC aluminum laptop for under

[00:17] $800. Sign me up. But what the heck is Wildcat Lake? In short, it's a new set of cutback processors using the same 18A manufacturing process as Panther Lake found in more expensive laptops. Wildcat will be marketed as just Core Series 3

[00:32] versus the Core Ultra Series 3 for Panther Lake. I'm sure this won't be confusing at all on product pages, but hey, they love to keep us in business. differences in performance a single word makes. The main difference with these

[00:45] new CPUs are that they have two less performance cores than the nonH8 core chips from Panther Lake. That means they have only two performance cores and four low power efficient cores. These are the same types of cores as Panther Lake,

[00:58] Cougar Cove Pecores, and Darkmont LP cores. Surprisingly, some of these are being run at slightly higher clock speeds, which can lead to better single core performance. To demonstrate this, we have one of the higherend Wildcat

[01:11] chips, the Core 7350 in HP's brand new Omnibook 5, a budget consumer laptop. testing a variety of common performance tasks. Single core performance is somewhere the Omnibook does very well. The Neo does win out here by quite a

[01:26] bit, but this Wildcat CPU is faster in single core than all other Intel and AMD chips. By the way, we are showing last gen's Qualcomm chip here because we don't have any laptops yet with the budget X2 chips like the Plus. When we

[01:40] the Omnibook 5 trade places with the Omnibook pulling out in front. This test maxes out the CPU, or in this case, a single thread to see what it is capable of. The Omnibook actually comes out on top among most of its competitors. Next,

[01:55] we'll check out Multicore, which is somewhere both the Omnibook and the Neo fall significantly behind competitors. The Omnibook is ahead of the Neo in Cinebench, the Omnibook's lead is more significant, but compared to all budget

[02:09] market, it's on the lower end. Multi-core isn't something that light users are likely to notice as much in their daily use. So, we feel Wildcat is very acceptable for those users. But if you're looking at these new laptops for

[02:23] something more like programming, we'd suggest looking elsewhere. Laptops from prior years, either refurbished or open box, will be available on steep powerful components for the same price. We've put many examples of these on our

[02:36] graphs. To look into power efficiency, we run Cinebench on all three performance modes of the laptop so that we can plot its score on our scatter plot. The y-axis is Cinebench 2026 multi-thread score and the x-axis is the

[02:48] multi-thread score and the x-axis is the CPU's power draw measured in watts. You want to see more performance for less power draw. When it comes to Wildcat Lake, the Core 7 350 on the graph in purple. It performs better overall than

[03:00] the A18 Pro in the Neo, but it's not more efficient in intensive tasks like this. It takes more power draw to score around the same in its balance mode. You'll also notice the lowest end 8core Panther Lake chip, the Ultra 7 355 on

[03:13] the graph, is more efficient than the Core 72. For the same amount of power, it performs better. We've noticed across all of our testing that more cores tend to make for a more efficient chip. We think this is because feeding more power

[03:26] to individual cores has diminishing marginal returns. When you add more cores, you can spread the load across and ideally run each core at a more efficient power level. The Ultra X9 on this graph has 16 cores instead of eight

[03:39] and performs much better for the same 20 watt power draw. The M5 does very well on this graph, which is to be expected because Apple leads in terms of power most power hungry here, and the Snapdragon X Elite chip from last gen is

[03:53] clustered between 20 to 30 W on the same line as the X9. One benefit of a lower powered processor is that it usually generates less heat. In my day-to-day felt completely cool to the touch, and I rarely heard fan noise, only when it was

[04:07] doing something like installing a program. The Omnibook has a fan, unlike the Neo. During more intensive tasks like Cinebench, the Omnibook stays under 40 C on the keyboard deck. Anything under 40 tends to be comfortable to use.

[04:20] On the underside, it warms up to 43 C, which you would notice, but it's not too uncomfortable for your lap. The Neo stays cooler here, especially on the underside, but as I said, the Omnibook is really fine, too. Both of the MacBook

[04:32] Airs get much warmer because they have more powerful processors, and like the Neo, they also don't have a fan to cool them. For fan noise, the Cinebench test emulates your worst case scenario. It hit 48 dB, which is certainly

[04:46] noticeable, but not loud as far as laptops go. Even at its worst, the Omnibook fans are not high-pitched or annoying. If you run in balanced mode, the fan noise is barely noticeable at all. You don't lose much performance

[04:59] either, so we'd likely recommend that mode. That's the mode I wrote this hooked up to an external monitor. As I said, I don't recall hearing fan noise at all in that mode. Battery life is another good indicator of processor

[05:12] efficiency. In this test, the Omnibook does amazingly well given its midsize battery. We test office tasks on repeat, and 11 hours likely translates to a full day of work. That's if you keep your brightness around 300 nits like we did.

[05:26] The Neo lasts far less, around half as long. That's mainly because it has a tiny battery. The screen's resolution is another factor to consider when it comes to battery life. The Omnibook has a lower 1920 x 1200 resolution. The Neo

[05:39] has a higher resolution display. Content does look sharper on a higher resolution panel, but they consume more power. Overall, we feel battery life is somewhere Wildcat laptops are going to consistently win out over the Neo. We

[05:52] expect other Windows laptops to come with batteries at least the size of this Omnibook. Another clear win for Wildcat laptops is that they can come with more than 8 gigs of memory. Our Omnibook 5 has 16 gigs versus the Neo's 8. This is

[06:06] more flexibility as far as what applications can be run on your machine. a memory roadblock when using specialized applications, although they may run into a roadblock in terms of overall CPU performance. On the other

[06:22] hand, 8 gigs of RAM on a MacBook tends to perform very well for basic home and office use. We haven't tested 8 gigs on a Windows laptop for some time now, so memory when we get some of these new Wildcat laptops in that specifically

[06:37] have 8 gigs. We've requested the 8 gig version of Dell's new XPS 13 to see how well their starting model does. Get subscribed with the notification bell on limitation of the MacBook Neo versus its siblings like the Air. In this case,

[06:51] Intel has not skimped on us. Wildcat Lake seems to support the same DDR5 processors in the Panther Lake lineup at 6400 and actually faster than LPDDR5X speeds than the 8 core ones at 7467. I'm specifically referring to the non-H Core

[07:07] Ultra processors. Where the limitation comes in for these Wildcat laptops versus Panther Lake ones is that they have a much lower maximum memory amount. have a much lower maximum memory amount. Only 48 gigs for LPDDR5X and 64 for

[07:19] DDR5. But with the very basic performance you're getting on these chips, we doubt people are going to want to package it with that much RAM anyway. We haven't talked about GPU performance yet, but it is pretty abysmal. Here's

[07:31] processors. We use Steel Nomad Light, which is a lightweight cross-platform benchmark, so we can compare to Mac OS. The only laptop performing worse than the Omnibook here is the Surface Laptop 13. And Snapdragon's first gen had

[07:44] horrible integrated graphics. You'd think this would mean creative tasks are our Photoshop test, we could see doing some very, very light photo editing on it, family photos, and that sort of thing. The Omnibook beats out the Neo

[07:58] pretty significantly here, but neither of them comes close to a MacBook Air. We didn't test video editing as we wouldn't recommend buying a Wildcat laptop or the should look for an older laptop with better specs. Another area where we

[08:14] believe Wildcat laptops will be more competitive than the Neo is ports, faster, and a wider selection. You can see that immediately on this Omnibook 5 where it has two USBC 3.2 two ports, an HDMI port, two USBA, and a headphone mic

[08:27] combo jack. We've left the most important factor for last, pricing. We currently have no idea how much this Omnibook 5 is going to cost, but we do know about the new XPS 13 with Wildcat. Its lowest config with 8 gigs of RAM is

[08:41] going to hit the market at $600. Given that it is a premium laptop likely to have build quality as good, if not better, than the Neos, as well as some key features it lacks, like a backlit keyboard, we feel Windows laptops are

[08:53] going to be extremely competitive at the Neo's price point. Props to Intel and Windows laptop manufacturers for turning this around so quickly. Above the $800 mark, though, we wouldn't recommend a Wildcat laptop. You're starting to

[09:05] encroach into MacBook Air territory, and those perform much better. If you are bestlaptop.deals. deals so you can see types of buyers and so you can get the best price on one. I personally use it

[09:18] because we track prices across retailers there. I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day and I will catch you later.