I need a portable laptop with a minimum of 32 GB of RAM for mainly office use, but I also want to occasionally play Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 on medium settings. I cannot sacrifice the speaker quality of the Zephyrus G14 or G16. However, I hate that the fan is always on. I’m not sure whether the Intel Ultra 7, Ultra 9, or AMD AI Max+ series can handle MSFS24 on medium settings properly.
Inside US Market
That’s gonna be difficult as Flight Simulator is a very demanding game. If you are looking at a thin and light that could play, it has to be a new Panther Lake laptop like the Asus Expertbook
I’ve not played Flight sim, but from what I understand it is quite demanding, but its also not a fast paced game. Have you ever considered, playing it in the cloud? Either with GeForce NOW or Xbox XCloud?
Given that some other 2025 games still are not possible to run on iGPUs even with Panther Lake, I would probably say that you unfortunately need a dGPU to play Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, and that you will also need a strong CPU, as I think it’s a very CPU heavy game too.
But what about Strix Halo tho? its iGPU like +30% more powerful than Panther Lake, and it has a beastly CPU thats waaaay ahead of Panther Lake too
And on top of the Asus TUF A14, Lenovo also just announced two more Strix Halo laptops:
The first one is just the Yoga Pro 7 with Strix Halo instead of an RTX 5050/5060; as we’ve seen from the TUF A14’s price in China, Strix Halo costs ~$150 less than a RTX 5060, so expect the Pro 7a to also be ~$150 cheaper than its RTX 5060 version.
But the second one is a definite curveball (even if iirc it didnt have a display unit on the MWC expo where Lenovo announced it), its a brand new 15 inch Legion 7a:
and on that expo, Lenovo explicitly mentioned that its coming out in June 2026.
Tho ngl, I really hope the Legion 7a is cheaper than the Yoga 7a Pro, since it definitely has less features than a Yoga 7 Pro, like no haptic touchpad or touchscreen
Just be aware that Strix Halo only officially has FSR 3.1 upscaling and that it is much worse than DLSS or even FSR 4. (You can get FSR 4 working on RDNA 3 & 3.5 with some hacks, but it will lose a lot of the upscaling gains in performance.)
If you really need something like Strix Halo, I would probably wait until AMD releases a successor with RDNA 4 or higher…
tho by 2027, I wonder if Panther Lake’s successor would catch up with Strix Halo in iGPU performance….
