Panther Lake's Gaming Chops Look Solid But The Battery Life Is... (2026)

We've had the chance to do some quick game testing of Panther Lake, Intel's latest generation of mobile chips, and we are impressed. That's good news for a company that has looked like it's been a bad place for far too long. I'm happy to hear that future Intel laptops could have good gaming chops without a dedicated GPU, but it's not just the gaming performance that has wowed me thus far. It's something much more mundane: multi-day laptop battery life.

AMD's SVP and GM of Client Product Group, Rahul Tikoo, recently took a swing at Panther Lake, and part of the argumentation is that consumers buy chips based on needs, rather than going for a little bit of everything. In this, Tikoo argues that AMD offers the top of the line for gaming, and therefore, gamers will pick AMD. However, as someone who games a lot, I don't actually look for the absolute best gaming performance out of my laptop. I look for 'good enough' gaming, plus solid ergonomics, a decent weight, and most importantly, strong battery life.

Panther Lake, with its sprinkling of P, E, LPE, and Xe3 cores, is being promised to offer an estimated up to 27 hours of Netflix streaming, which is up to 60% more than Lunar Lake.

MSI's Prestige Panther Lake laptops put those figures at "up to 30+ hours of 1080p video playback". Naturally, gaming will hog that battery much more than streaming shows, but those are still impressive stats nonetheless. As well as this, battery performance will depend on battery size and things like screen size and panel type. For this reason, comparisons aren't an exact parallel. Still, the ROG Flow Z13 with its AI Max 390 chip estimates 10+ hours of battery life out of its 70 WH battery and our Flow Z13 testing measured around an hour and a half of gaming.

Asus' Zenbook S14 UX5406 with its Lunar Lake Intel Core Ultra 9 288V estimates 27 hours of battery life from its 72 Wh, with a very similar methodology to MSI. The PCMark battery life test puts that at 155 minutes while gaming. Two and a half hours of battery life is very solid for a laptop, and if Panther Lake is handily beating those figures, I'd be very happy.

This is because, as much as I love to crank a game up to its highest resolution and best fps, I've never expected that from a device on the go. If it can fit into my bag, and I can use it for a day of work and a spot of gaming from a cafe, I'd be much happier.

I have a chunky Lenovo Legion I bought five years ago with an RTX 30-something in it, and it's still no

Source: PC Gamer