Intel Core Ultra 5 125H

Description

Introduced in December 2023, the Intel Core Ultra 5 125H is a powerful processor from Intel's new Meteor Lake generation and can be seen as a worthy entry into the high-end CPU class.

Technical data and performance of the Intel Core Ultra 5 125H

The Intel Core Ultra 5 125H has four performance cores that support hyperthreading and eight efficiency cores. In the new tile/chiplet design, two additional low-power efficiency cores are also installed on the low-power island, which then take over in idle mode and at low load, thus helping to save power. The Intel Core Ultra 5 125H has a total of 18 threads and 18 MB L3 cache, which can be used to quickly retrieve and process frequently used data. Intel specifies the power consumption at 28 watts; in low-power mode, the CPU only requires 20 watts, but then only clocks at 700 MHz. In boost mode, the consumption can increase to up to 115 watts, but then the CPU also clocks at up to 4.5 GHz. In comparison: The Intel Core Ultra 7 155H clocks at up to 4.8 GHz with the two performance cores with the same consumption.

Integrated graphics card and additional functions

The Intel Core Ultra 5 125H uses an Intel Arc iGPU with seven cores. The new iGPU is based on the Xe LPG architecture, an efficiency-focused adaptation of the architecture of dedicated Arc GPUs. Just as the design of the CPUs within the Meteor Lake H series is largely the same, the iGPUs are also very similar. An Intel Arc 7C GPU 2.2 GHz is integrated in the Intel Core Ultra 7 125H, which has seven ray tracing units, seven samplers and four pixel backends in addition to the seven Xe cores and is manufactured using the 5nm process. According to Intel, performance has improved significantly compared to the Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 96 EUs. It clocks more than 50% faster than the Iris Xe and has sufficient performance to run office applications, enable streaming and also master simple image and video editing. In initial tests, the Arc iGPU can even impress in gaming - Hogwarts Legacy or Cyberpunk can be played relatively smoothly with it, albeit at lower detail levels. Less graphics-intensive titles, for example from the FIFA series, run smoothly at medium to high detail levels and in FHD resolution.
The Intel Core Ultra 5 125H supports WiFi 6E and Thunderbolt. The memory controller is identical to that in the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and Intel Core Ultra 9 185H and supports up to 96 GB DDR5-5600 or up to 64 GB LPDDR5x-7467 RAM. Intel Core i7-14700HX and Intel Core i9-14900HX can be installed with up to 192 GB DDR-5600.

Conclusion

All in all, the Intel Core Ultra 5 125H is a powerful processor that can certainly be used for gaming and creative work, but is probably best suited for office applications and multimedia use.

Status: 02/2024