On Monday at CES Intel announced Panther Lake as Core Ultra Series 3 with the initial laptop designs to be available for pre-order starting the following day, 6 January, while global availability is expected around 27 January. Now a few days after pre-orders opened up, few options are available and some of the models will not be shipping until mid-February.
Since the 6th I’ve been looking around quite a bit at US Internet retailers and that of the major manufacturers to explore Panther Lake laptop pre-order options. I haven’t heard from Intel or any partners in recent days around any review samples for the 27th launch day, so like with most prior Intel laptop SoC generations, I’ll likely have to resort to buying a unit retail if wanting to deliver any Panther Lake Linux support/compatibility review and performance benchmarks of Core Ultra Series 3 on Linux. Thus I’ve been looking around a lot to see what my options are for best value and also getting a Panther Lake laptop ASAP.
As I reported on the 6th, especially with Intel not talking much about pricing at their CES event on the 5th, the best deal I found was an Intel Core Ultra X7 385H with 32GB of RAM for $1299 USD. That was for an MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ Evo at B&H or a similarly spec’ed HP OmniBook X for $1299 USD. With today’s RAM pricing especially, the Core Ultra X7 358H with 16 cores and the 12 Xe core Xe3 graphics, 32GB LPDDR5X memory, and 1TB NVMe SSD at $1299 USD is decent — if the Linux support is in order and the performance can meet expectations.
Since then the Dell XPS 14 and Dell XPS 16 for Panther Lake have appeared and available for pre-order. But with Dell they anticipate availability starting ~10 February. Their prices are much higher with the Core Ultra X7 358H base model with 32GB of LPDDR5X and 1TB SSD going for $2049+ USD. The Dell XPS 16 also with the Core Ultra X7 358H starts out at $2199 USD.
On the HP website they also list now their OmniBook Ultra with the COre Ultra 7 356H and 32GB of RAM for $1549 USD. Its availability is listed as shipping 11 February.
At least of common US Internet retailers and searching elsewhere, I haven’t seen any other options for pre-order this week.
The HP and Dell options I immediately wrote off for my own consideration given their higher price being out of scope for my tight budget for testing. Plus those not shipping until mid-February. The HP OmniBook X at BestBuy was since de-listed. So that left the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ Evo with the Core Ultra X7 358H, 14-inch 1920 x 1200 OLED display, 32GB LPDDR5X memory, and 1TB NVMe SSD for $1299 USD.
B&H mostly has listed that option as “Notify When Available” without the option to pre-order, but for a brief time on Tuesday it did offer the option of ordering. So I went ahead and pre-ordered that MSI laptop for Panther Lake Linux testing at Phoronix. They don’t have any delivery estimate but hopefully it will be in January. In the meantime I’ll continue my searching for any other ~$1300 Panther Lake laptop that might be available earlier. Or ideally if I end up receiving any Panther Lake review sample from Intel or any of the laptop vendors. But typically how it goes for Linux laptop testing, that’s quite rare. Thankfully B&H is straight-forward with their pre-order cancelling if any other better options materialize. In any event, stay tuned to Phoronix for Panther Lake Linux testing soon with plenty of CPU benchmarks and also the interesting Xe3 graphics.
