My sister’s fifteen year old laptop she was using for basic school use has finally given up recently, so we were thinking about getting her a replacement. Though with the current laptop prices, especially here in Ukraine, I’ve been increasingly looking at the used laptop market instead.
Do you think the laptops with Intel’s Raptor Lake P or Meteor Lake H series processors are worth looking at in the used market now in 2026? I think we’ve seen both at around 600€ mark a couple of times, so I’ve been considering it as an option now.
It feels like the Lunar Lake laptops seem to start around 1500€ over here, which is a little bit outside of our budget right now, not even talking about Panther Lake, which don’t seem to be available in our region yet at all.
She will probably use her laptop for basic office use (web browsing, Microsoft Office, that sort of thing, though she tends to love to have dozens of tabs open at the same time), so I don’t think we’d need a laptop too powerful, but I don’t want to buy a laptop that would scream the need of replacement in a year or two because the software she’d need in university won’t run on it (though I think she wants to go at finance or something, which shouldn’t be that computationally expensive in that regard, at least as far as I’d imagine)
Our stores have been running promotions on Xiaomi’s RedmiBooks recently, which fell into this price point, but they have either AMD’s Zen 3 processors that I already have a “fun” time with in my HP ProBook right now, or Intel’s Alder Lake, which, from what I read, wouldn’t be much better, so it feels like those will be a terrible value for money for those laptops.
What do you guys think?
Thanks in advance for your help.
-Cosmic
I’m so sorry about what is going on in Ukraine. Stay safe out there.
I think Meteor Lake is worth it only on a sale. If the laptop in question around the €600 mark (I’m assuming not including the EU VAT because that makes things more tricky for currency conversion) is a premium or at least upper mid-range laptop with at least 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage, it may be worth considering.
Alder Lake for laptops was a bad time for Intel laptops, especially as it was often much worse efficiency wise than AMD Zen 3 (Ryzen 5000 & 6000 CPUs for laptops) and even older Intel laptop architectures, leading to many Intel laptops from that era with poor battery life and poor thermals, which often led to an overall a lot of heat on the laptop and much louder fans.
However, the Intel CPU architecture quality was actually even worse with the next generation following Alder Lake, which was Raptor Lake. The CPUs sold under the 13th and 14th gen naming convention are Raptor Lake CPUs, as are Core Series 2 CPUs (not Core Ultra 2 Series CPUs, which are either Lunar Lake or Arrow Lake, which do not have these issues I’m about to mention). These Raptor Lake CPUs had many issues,even at launch, that many “reviewers” at the time simply glossed over. The first was that Raptor Lake in general had very poor efficiency, one of the worst CPU generation of any brand in recent memory in that regard. It drew a lot of power and generated a lot of heat, to the point where an AIO for the 13th and 14th i7 & i9 CPUs on desktop were basically mandatory. Despite this, in gaming on average, Hardware Unboxed (a small group of Australian YouTube reviewers who we trust for desktop CPU & GPU coverage) found that the Intel Core i9-14900K (which was bascially just a better binned and better tuned out of the factory i9-13900K) was still slightly behind the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D in terms of gaming performance in a 25 game average, despite the Intel CPU using 25% more power on average to roughly match it.
This was a CPU gaming benchmark with the RTX 4090 GPU (to minimize GPU bottlenecks as this was meant to be a CPU benchmark comparison) with 3 of the games at 1080p shows that the shows that the Intel i9-14900K in 6 of the games in the earlier comparison used around 25% more power than the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D for similar performance, making the Ryzen CPU much more power efficient.
(In addition, on desktops, Raptor Lake was also the final CPU on the LGA 1700 socket, meaning any new CPU upgrades would also require a new motherboard, which has historically been a weak point for Intel and is happening again from Arrow Lake to Nova Lake. This makes AMD’s AM4 & AM5 that much more impressive for desktops imo, especially with AM5 being supported until 2029 and also getting Zen 4, Zen 5, Zen 6, and possibly Zen 7 with just a BIOS / UEFI / firmware update.)
But the reason I cannot recommend any systems with Raptor Lake CPUs, especially desktops or laptops with HX CPUs for high performance laptops, is because of the issue with the CPUs degrading because of a bug in the CPU microcode that caused too high voltage to be sent to the CPU for extended periods of time, literally cooking it alive. While Intel eventually rolled out a fix with the OEMs and motherboard makers to resolve this issue going forward, any CPUs already degraded need to be replaced, and Intel’s track record for these replacements has not been very good. So basically, you’re gambling on the CPU not cooking itself because if it does, you may be paying a lot more for something that may not even make it very long.
Raptor Lake H was better, but still not very impressive for the price.
So for the TL;DR, Meteor Lake should only be gotten on a sale, while I would avoid Raptor Lake HX laptops (and especially Raptor Lake desktops) if at all possible. Raptor Lake H or U should only be gotten on a bigsale.
First, good job looking into some of these older laptop processors. @cameron above has brought up some interesting points in the grand scheme of all CPUs. He is not wrong, there was some time where there was little innovation in cpus.
However the processors aren’t bad for your 15 year old sister. Technically Meteor Lake H came after Raptor Lake P. So I would try to get Meteor Lake H assuming the laptops are similar. Raptor Lake P was in between Intel’s U and H series. Around 28 Watts of power, so a decent amount, good enough for web browsing and what you suggested. Meteor lake H replaced it, as CPUs after that became very variable based on how much power was fed to it. So it could be fed 28 watts or 60 watts.
What matters more is Meteor Lake H is better. It is going to be fine for a 15 year old doing basic office use with alot of tabs open.
I actually was looking at the Raptor Lake laptops to begin with because I remember Cierra telling not to look at anything under Intel’s 13th gen in her gaming laptops under $600 video last year
we have a 20% VAT on virtually everything here, including laptops, so I didn’t really look into the new laptop market since I thought I’d get better bang for my buck on the used market instead
another thing we have here that kinda annoys me is that the laptops hit our market very late… unless it’s Apple. unlike smartphones, funnily enough. like, I don’t think we still have any Panther Lake laptops being sold in our region yet, and it’s July already
Anyway, back to the topic, since anything that new would definitely be out of our budget in the first place
I thought I wouldn’t find anything newer than Raptor Lake for what we had in our budget for this even on the used market, but then I stumbled upon a Samsung Galaxy Book 4 with a Core Ultra 5 150H for an equivalent of about €550 on our regional craigslist, which prompted me to make this thread since I wasn’t sure if it was worth looking in this direction
