Club Benefits
Intel Core Ultra Series 3 made such a strong debut that we gave it top honors in our CES 2026 awards. Now, I am daily driving the redesigned Asus Zenbook Duo sporting the Intel Core Ultra X9 388H chip, and I want to review it with your help.
For Tom’s Guide’s first-ever live Q&A, I have one simple question: what benchmarks/tests do you want me to run? Whether you’re looking for benchmark numbers, something more finite or general use impressions, I’m here to give you as much information as possible.
Based on how many people are reading up on the leaked benchmarks in the CPU wars of 2026, I know a lot of you are keen to see how good this chip is outside of the tests you’ve seen so far. So, to help with the key decision on whether to buy one, get your requests in, and I will be sharing the results soon.
How to ask questions
All you have to do is jump to the comments section at the bottom and ask away. From there, I’ll run through as many of them as I can in chronological order and share results/impressions with you.
I will only be answering questions about this Intel Core Ultra X9 388H laptop, and I want this to be a safe space for anyone to know anything about it. Please treat everyone (including yours truly) with respect and avoid any nasty language.
What is Intel Core Ultra X9 388H?
To catch you up, Intel announced these chips under the codename of Panther Lake back in September 2025, and from the word "go," I was blown away by the performance and power efficiency of this top-of-the-range chip.
That comes down to three key things. First, the new generation of chip architecture (named Intel 18A) makes small but crucial changes to the way transistors are made to ensure every drip of power is committed towards the chip's tasks and not wasted.
Second, the new low power cores are packed with memory that allows them to do more of the general day-to-day tasks at a super lower wattage. And third, that integrated GPU is a bit of a breakthrough — packing 12 beasty Xe3 cores alongside Intel's own AI trickery in XeSS resolution scaling and multi-frame generation to deliver some crazy good performance.
I will be doing so many tests of this myself, and I'm looking forward to running it through the gauntlet of all your test questions too!
