MSI Refreshes Gaming Laptop Series With Intel 11th Gen H-Series CPU Lineup

MSI recently held a “Tech meets Aesthetics” event, where the Taiwanese PC and laptop maker announced that it had refreshed its laptop lineup, both for gaming and its Creator series, with Intel’s new 11th generation Tiger Lake-H series CPUs.

For its gaming lineup, the refresh includes MSI’s currently existing GS, GE, GF, GL, and GP series of laptops. Specifically, both the GS and GE series will have SKUs that accommodate Intel’s top-tier Core i9 CPU, while the top-of-the-line models released in the remaining three series will be fitted with the top-range Core i7 CPU.

With Intel’s latest Tiger Lake H-series CPU now powering MSI’s laptops, consumers who purchase them will gain not only to improved CPU performance, but also access to new features such as PCIe Gen4, Thunderbolt 4, and Wi-Fi 6E.

Then, as now, all of MSI’s Intel 11th generation gaming laptops are paired with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 Series Mobile GPUs. That list includes the recently launched GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti discrete GPUs that is only available for laptops.

As for their availability, MSI currently has the GE66, GL66, and GL76 available for preorder via its official Lazada store page, with the first batch expected to be available as early as next week. As for the other models, the brand says that they should come  sometime in June, although it did not specify an exact date.

Dell XPS Desktop with 11th Gen Intel Core CPU Refresh Coming Soon To Malaysia

Aside from Alienware Aurora R12, Dell has also confirmed that there will be another desktop model that is already on its way to Malaysia with the newly announced 11th Gen Intel Core processors, codenamed Rocket Lake-S. Once again, it will not be an all-new model though but instead, the model is actually a refreshed variant of XPS Desktop.

While we will only know the full specs list once the model is listed on Dell Malaysia’s website towards the end of this month, the refreshed XPS Desktop can be fitted with up to Intel Core i9-11900KF. The general global specs sheet also listed graphics option of up to NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 although if you prefer to have an AMD graphics card instead, the option is somehow limited to Radeon RX 5700 XT.

Other than that, the XPS Desktop can also support up to 2TB PCIe NVMe M.2 solid state drive and 2TB 7200rpm SATA hard drive. Together with the ability to support Wi-Fi 6, the model could also be fitted with a power supply unit of up to 500W depending on markets and hardware configurations.

In Malaysia, the base model comes with an 11th Gen Intel Core i5 chip alongside 8GB of RAM, 512GB SSD, and GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER graphics card for RM 3,699. We will keep you posted once the refreshed XPS Desktop appears on Dell Malaysia’s website, so stay tuned.

Intel To Make Resizable BAR Available On 11th Gen Rocket Lake Processors

Intel says that it intends on making the Resizable BAR feature available via 11th generation Rocket Lake CPUs. The PCIe feature, which is used to expand the data channels between the CPU and GPU, has seen growing interest since AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series launch last year.

To recap, AMD announced that its support for the feature in the form of Smart Access Memory, or SAM for short. While similar to the Resizable BAR feature, SAM is system-specific in that it only works when a Ryzen 5000 series CPU is paired with a Radeon RX 6000 series graphics. The feature has already been proven to work, especially in several titles that benefit from AMD’s hardware.

Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long until its rival, NVIDIA, announced that its Ampere-based GPUs would support Resizable BAR, with its recently announce GeForce RTX 30 Series mobile GPU being the first of its kind to support it.

To be fair, this isn’t the first time that news regarding Intel and the Resizable BAR feature has made the headlines. Back in December, a Japan-based tech site claimed to have successfully gotten the PCIe feature to work between a Radeon RX 6800XT and an Intel Z490 motherboard, albeit with a firmware flash to the motherboard. Upon activating the feature, the editor of the site did note an overall improvement in framerates for select game titles, across the board.