 So it's that time of year again. Intel has released its new mobile processors, its 12th Gen line code named Alder Lake. The desktop versions of these chips have been out for a while and they're quite powerful, but we've been waiting for months to try out the laptop versions and see how they compare to the best chips on the market, including of course Apple's M1 Macs. And we finally got a system in our hands. We've run some tests, we've exported some videos, we've played some games, and we finally got answers to the questions we've been asking for months. Well, we kind of do. There are some caveats, so let's get into it. Alder Lake is an entirely new architecture for Intel and it represents a major strategic shift for the company. Intel processors have showed off some serious single-core power in recent years, but where they've really fallen behind Apple and AMD is in power efficiency, that is, battery life. So this year, Intel is going hybrid. Like Apple's M1, these new chips have a combination of performance cores and efficiency cores. The chip we have today is the Core i9-12900HK, which is the flagship of this year's Alder Lake mobile line. Intel says it's the most powerful bubble chip that it's ever made, so it has 14 cores, including 6 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores. If any Intel chip is going to beat Apple's powerhouses, it's probably this one. The system we have here is the MSI GE76 Raider, and this gaming laptop is the mother of all gaming laptops. It's 17 inches, it's covered in RGB, it's six and a half pounds, and it's got Nvidia's brand new GeForce RTX 380 Ti mobile GPU and some heavy-duty cooling inside. Before we go any further, the thing to note about this device is that it's not cheap. The 12th-gen GE76 Raider models will start as low as $1599, but if you want the powerful specs we have here, you'll need to fork over $3,999. You can probably see why Intel chose this device as the first Alder Lake laptop to show the public. It's about as close to a desktop as a laptop can get. So if you are the most powerful chip on the market trying to show off your full potential, the GE76 Raider is where you want to live. Now, there are a lot of things to like about the GE76 Raider. The keyboard and the light strip are both full of pretty colors, and while the keys aren't the fastest or the sturdiest ones I've ever used, they have a quite a satisfying click. The speakers are fantastic with some serious bass, which I rarely ever get to say about laptop audio, and the port selection is huge. So you get three USB-A, two USB-C, a full-size SD slot, a headphone jack, a display port, an HDMI, and an Ethernet jack. And everything is pretty spread out. I really had all the ports I needed. But there are also some things that are a bit odd to see at the moment. In particular, if you're paying $4,000 for a laptop, you would probably expect that laptop to have a QHD if not a 4K screen. But nope, our test model is a good 1920x1080 with a 360Hz refresh rate. That's a lot of frames, but on a 17-inch display, it still means you're talking about some substantial pixels. And while my games didn't look terrible, they did look a bit grainy. MSI is also selling a 240Hz QHD model for the same $4,000 price, and to be honest, I don't see a reason not to just buy that one, unless you're an eSports person who really needs those extra frames. For everyone else, the primary benefit of having a 360Hz 1080p screen is that it allows Intel's processor to show off some absolutely absurd frame rates. So let's talk about those frame rates. This is, hands down, the most powerful gaming laptop I have ever tested. On famously demanding games like Red Dead Redemption 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, this G76 put up the best frame rates we've ever seen. I ran CSGO, which is a super CPU-heavy game, mostly for fun, and averaged 415 frames per second, which I think is the highest frame rate I've ever seen. A laptop generate on any game ever. Our favorite gaming laptop of 2021, the Zephyrus G15, got less than half that. So this is mostly just to get those numbers out of the way. If you're paying $4,000 for a gaming laptop, you should be getting better frame rates than every other gamer you know. But what's even more impressive is how dominant this chip is in productivity workloads. We ran our real-world 4K video export, and the G76 Raider just wrecked it. It finished in just a minute 56. That's the fastest time I've ever seen a laptop complete this test except for, can you guess, the M1 MacBook Pro with M1 Macs. Now, because different versions of Premiere Pro can impact export time, this real-world test doesn't always make for the best performance. But the G76 was even more dominant on the synthetic Puget Systems benchmark for Premiere Pro, which tests live playback and export performance. So this device got the highest score I have ever seen a laptop get on that test. Not only is it beating Intel's 11th-gen chips, but it's beating every score I've ever seen an M1 machine get. You're getting desktop-level performance here when it comes to content creation. But there are some big, big asterisks here. So first, this is a huge laptop. For some context, the 16-inch MacBook Pro that achieved these results is far more powerful than the G76. The 16-inch MacBook Pro that achieved these results is 4.8 pounds and 0.66 inches thick. That's not a tiny machine, but the G76 Raider is 6.5 pounds and over an inch thick. That extra size and weight is a significant compromise. Now, before you get mad at me in the comments, I know the G76 and the MacBook are targeting different audiences. And these comparisons between the Core i9 and the M1 Macs probably don't matter to too many gamers. But they matter in general because they help us see where Intel is in the context of the broader market. And they help illustrate how much extra power and cooling the Core i9 needs to achieve this performance. And then there's battery life. The battery life, it wasn't great. I got just over four and a half hours when I was multitasking in Chrome, and that's not a terrible result among today's 17-inch gaming laptops. But that was sort of Intel's whole goal in moving to a hybrid architecture. It was supposed to deliver exceptional battery life. And this battery life is just average. And it's nowhere near the 10-hour lifespan we got out of our 16-inch M1 Mac system. While gaming on battery, the G76 could go for an hour and 15 minutes before dying. That's actually an okay score, but it's somewhat misleading because the game was only really playable until about 45 to 50 minutes in. For the last half hour or so, it was stuttering all over the place and just not really fun. That makes me nervous for what we might see coming out of ultra-powerable laptops, where battery life is way more important than it is for gaming devices. This was a test of Alder Lake's eCores, and in my opinion, they didn't pass. All in all, from the battery life to the weight to the port selection, it's increasingly clear why Intel chose the GE76 to show off Alder Lake Mobile for the first time. It's a laptop that's meant to spend most of its time plugged in, so battery life isn't super important. And it's a laptop that puts basically no constraints on the Core i9 inside. MSI was able to pair the chip with Nvidia's top-of-the-line mobile GPU and provide the heavy-duty cooling necessary to make that pair work. And it's charging a very, very high price for all that engineering. But the GE76 Raider is still a pretty specific use case. And if the rest of the market is any indication, shoppers, myself included, really want thin and portable laptops right now. Many of the biggest manufacturers are making their laptops thinner and lighter at the expense of other features. To really judge whether Intel's venture into hybrid architecture has been successful, we need to know whether these mobile chips will deliver in a thin, light, and most importantly, affordable chassis in the future. We've seen Alder Lake perform very well in multiple power user desktop scenarios at this point, but on-the-go use for me is still a question mark. So, yes, Intel has made an astonishingly powerful chip. Good job, Intel. Good job. But when it comes to performance and battery life in a machine I might actually want to buy, I'm still waiting. Thanks for watching. Make sure to like and subscribe. And while you're here, make sure to watch Becca's latest full-frame video on how to shoot better night photos.